The Return of Little Big Man

by Thomas Berger

  You can see how he turned the point I was making. It wasn’t easy to argue with an Indian. So I just noted that “Cody says red men are Americans now too.”

  “I will call myself American when more Americans than Cody call me one.” Wolf made two words of Co-dee. Indians tended to complicate the simplest white names, so you could see why they wouldn’t even try to say longer ones like Winchester and Smith and Wesson. Usually even the non-Sioux called Cody by the Lakota term Pahaska, meaning Long Hair, for to an Indian a name always had to have a personal reference to the individual holding it, which is why there couldn’t ever be, say, a Bad Bear, Jr. If Cody’s Sioux name sounds familiar, it might be because Custer was also called Long Hair, though as I’ve said earlier he was known to the Crow, who liked him but not so much they stayed to die with him at the Greasy Grass, as Son of the Morning Star.

  “I will call you an American if you want,” I says.

  He frowned under them glaring slashes of color, which was especially bright in that it was not homemade Cheyenne stuff but rather theatrical greasepaint. “Do you have to be American to be white?”

  He had asked me a question nobody but an Indian would of thought of, I swear. If you want to know what I consider most valuable of all the things I learned from the Cheyenne, beyond the practical matters like riding, hunting, et cetera, I’d have to say how to look at life from other angles than the obvious.

  “No,” I says. “There are all kinds of white people on the earth, many different tribes from the Americans. In fact, there was no American tribe in the beginning. It was not created by the Everywhere Spirit but by people, as a big family which everybody can join and get a new start, no matter who he is, what he has, or where he came from.” I never waited for him to point out the exceptions to this, at least as it was practiced, but added, “It is a fine dream, and as with all such it is not exactly like life, else there would have been no reason for a dream. But you are right if you think it is a dream of white people and applied first to their own kind.”

  Wolf smiled, which was an interesting expression on somebody wearing warpaint: if you was seeing it for the first time, you would of thought it extra-ferocious. “It is good to take care of your own kind.”

  “That is true. But there’s also this vision by which all people are part of one big family and therefore should help one another, regardless of color or language or land.”

  “I don’t want to insult you,” Wolf said, “if that is your own dream, but it seems to make little sense. The Human Beings are the greatest of all peoples. How can they belong to the same family as the Crows and Pawnees, who are so inferior to them?”

  Now if you are white you will usually hear this argument coming from them who dominate others not as numerous or rich or powerful as themselves, and if you are fair you’ll have to say, even if you agree with it, that it’s the reasoning of the bully. But ever since I knowed them the Cheyenne’s successes was momentary whereas their catastrophes had all but brung them to extinction. If you still believe yourself best after all that, it’s mighty damned impressive for my money, and I ain’t going to try to talk you out of it, for you might be right on some higher level.

  “These are matters that must be thought and talked about a great deal,” I told him. “Meanwhile go home and do the spring planting. I hope you can come back for the summer season.”

  “I can’t speak for the others,” he says, “but maybe I’ll wait awhile. Getting money is good, but sometimes your friends and even your relatives feel bad if you make too much,” By which he was referring to envy, and I assure you Indians feel it, even when as in Wolf’s case and that of most of the Cheyenne with our show, they sent the largest part of their wages back home, in care of the local Indian Bureau agent, who I just hoped was honest.

  “I’ll miss the Human Beings,” I said. And in more ways than one. My job had been looking after that bunch. I knew Cody would keep me on in some capacity, but Nate Salsbury was always searching for ways to economize, and he wouldn’t tolerate me going back to being Buffalo Bill’s private barkeep.

  “You can interpret for the Sioux,” Wolf pointed out. “You speak pretty good Lakota by now. You are a better student than I was at Gold Leaf’s school, I have to admit.”

  Nice of him to say so, but I had stuck at it with the lessons he give me, plus quite a bit of practice with the Sioux, around their campfires after supper, for in the days before the show got its own electric-generating rig we didn’t perform at night.

  “But Cody doesn’t need any more translators of Lakota,” I says. The head one was a white fellow named John Y. Nelson, who also acted as driver of the Deadwood stage and was married in real life to a Sioux woman and had a number of little kids who looked like full-bloods and also took part in the show.

  “But there will have to be a special one for Tatanka Iyotake,” Wolf said.

  “Where’s he going to be?”

  “Here,” said Wolf. “Or wherever Pahaska takes the show.”

  That was some news, and I can tell you none of the whites with the Wild West knowed anything about it yet, I wager to say not even Cody or Salsbury at this early date. True, Bill had tried to get this distinguished person to join the show a year before, but the agent at the Standing Rock reservation wouldn’t grant permission.

  Cody would reapply later this spring, but Wolf Coming Out already knowed, in some Indian fashion that did not use the telegraph or the U.S. mails, that the second request would be successful and that the next big star of B.B.W.W., to use Annie Oakley’s term, would rival even her in popularity for one season. I speak of none other than Sitting Bull.

  13. Sitting Bull

  BUFFALO BILL GOT PERMISSION from the Indian Bureau and the agent to sign up Sitting Bull for the Wild West, but the Bull himself had to agree, and according to Cody had to be talked into it in person, so Arizona John Burke was going to the Hunkpapa agency at Standing Rock, Dakota Territory, to see the old fellow—who was about fifty at that time, while I myself was only a half-dozen years younger.

  As to “Major” Burke, I expect that rank was give him by “Colonel” Cody, who had if you recall made me on first acquaintance a captain, but at least I had had some association with the Army (mostly through having been attacked by it while living with the Cheyenne), whereas Burke had only been around show business and newspapers all his life, talking and writing in an inflated style that put Cody’s in the shade though it might of been the source of some of Buffalo Bill’s own lingo. I also doubt he had ever been near Arizona Territory, but Burke was the type of person who would not of used any rank or title to which he had a real claim, because his purpose, like the typical press agent, was to make you believe in something you would not have thought of, and he would of been so disappointed to know you already believed it without his help he might of started to argue in the reverse, for what he wanted was power over you.

  I can’t take credit for coming to that conclusion on my own. It was Sitting Bull who commented to that effect after hearing Burke talk for three minutes in that log cabin of his on the Grand River at the Standing Rock reservation.

  First I should say I was there only through chance, as usual, John Y. Nelson, and the others including his eldest son who spoke both Lakota and English, being sick or otherwise occupied, and Cody wouldn’t trust any interpreter supplied by the agent, for there had been too many false translations in the past, one of the most notorious being that of Frank Grouard, which, like I said, maybe got Crazy Horse killed.

  But he knowed I had been studying the language, so he asked me if I was good enough yet to handle the assignment, and I says sure, though I wasn’t certain by any means, but Cody always had so much of the positive in his own manner as to remove your doubts about yourself.

  Now when I told Mr. and Mrs. Butler who I was going off to see, Annie says, “Jack, you ask the chief if he remembers Little Sure Shot, and if he does, you give him my regards.” Turned out she and Sitting Bull had met once after a perfo
rmance of hers in St. Paul, Minnesota!

  “What was he doing there?” I asked.

  “Why,” says she, “they took a troupe of Sioux around to a number of cities, Sitting Bull among them.”

  “So he’s already been a showman?”

  “Ah,” Frank says in his Irish fashion, “he sat there, ya know, and people paid to look at him. He came to see Annie perfarm and was quate taken with her.”

  Annie give her modest girlish smile. “According to the translator, he said he wanted to adopt me for a daughter, but”—she put her head down—“I don’t know about that.”

  “He gave her that name,” said Frank.

  I went to the Sioux camp and got the Lakota version of “Little Sure Shot,” so when the right moment arrived I could say it correctly.

  Now when Burke started to talk to Sitting Bull, I got a little flustered and was forced to substitute a Cheyenne term or two when I didn’t know the right Sioux word, and Bull’s scowl got even worse than his natural expression, which was normally disapproving when he talked with whites.

  And he said a time or two, “I don’t speak Shyela.”

  So I finally took the courage to come out with it. “I am sorry,” I says. “I have studied Lakota, but am not as young as I once was and cannot learn as fast as when I was a boy and lived with the Shyelas.”

  After that admission, he gradually altered his manner with me, for contrary to appearances Sitting Bull was a tolerant and generous man, though he never did warm up to Burke. First he said I didn’t look that old, and I got a smile out of him on saying I wasn’t all that much younger than him, only small as I was I might not look it. And then he begged my pardon for criticizing my knowledge of the Sioux language, which was really not bad, and next he asked me about my Cheyenne boyhood and the band I was with and the fights and horse-stealing and the rest. I think what he was doing was checking up on my claim, though an Indian was too polite to let on when the subject was, so to speak, exclusively Indian. But he wasn’t hesitant to voice his distrust of the Americans.

  I reckon he came to believe in me, for he finally says, “Have you been telling me exactly what this fat man says in English, or have you made some changes?”

  “I have cut it in about half.”

  “Still too much of it is empty wind,” said Sitting Bull. “You might cut that half in half. Up to now he has been talking for himself.”

  Thinking his spiel was going over, Arizona John proceeds, “Chief, I assure you that the acclaim which will greet you on each and every appearance with what Colonel Cody modestly calls an exhibition but to the great American public is an extravaganza the like of which has never been known since the dawn of man, bar none, the acclaim, I say, Chief, will exceed any you have received throughout your illustrious career even from your dusky brethren.”

  “He just said more of the same thing he said before,” I told Sitting Bull.

  “Tell him I’m going to cut his throat and then scalp him.”

  Knowing this was his Indian idea of a joke, I admit I found it funny myself, so I laughed.

  “Well,” Burke says, smiling too, “we seem to be hitting it off nicely.”

  We was sitting on blankets on the floor of Bull’s log cabin. Burke had been forced to lower his load of lard with some difficulty. How he would get up was to be proved. Sitting Bull had asked the hospitable question all visitors got on entering an Indian camp, “Do you want to eat?” I had declined, for though we was overdue for a meal, I didn’t want to see Burke hog up a week’s worth of the meager rations the Bull would of been issued by the agency. The cabin was just one room, reminding me of mine in Tombstone, except there was Indian stuff strewn about here, blankets and medicine bundles, et cetera, and some things hanging from nails, like a warbonnet and a hunk of bacon. There had been some other Indians too, females and some youngsters, probably his wives and children, but they was not introduced, and left when I politely turned down the meal. If I knowed kids, these was probably disappointed, expecting to eat some of the food prepared for us.

  Now, it wasn’t that Sitting Bull was against oratory, coming as he did from a people who admired speechifying almost as much as fighting, but the Bull by now knowed enough about American ways to be aware that Burke, unlike an Indian, was not in it for the spirituality.

  So I says to Arizona John, who by the way let his hair grow long like Cody’s, a mess of stringy curls down to his shoulders, “He wants to know how much you will pay him.”

  When I told Sitting Bull what I had told Burke he made that kind of cough Indians do to indicate amazement, for he himself was too polite to have asked that question so soon. “I have been interpreted wrongly many times,” he said. “But this is the first time that something that did not come from my lips is actually a question that comes from my heart.” At a later point in our acquaintanceship he give me examples of the bad translations he had had to put up with, which he didn’t even know about until someone who spoke both tongues, an Indian or the rare friendly white, informed him. One of them was the year before, when him and a delegation of other Sioux was hauled around the East to appear onstage, sitting at a fake campfire in front of a canvas tepee, while a white lecturer talked about the Red Man.

  In Philadelphia, Sitting Bull was asked to make a little speech in Lakota, so the audience could hear what savage lingo sounded like. He spoke about how the Indian now had no choice but to walk the white man’s road in peace and of the need to see their children get educated. Afterwards a young Sioux student from the school at Carlisle come backstage to tell him the remarks had been translated by the show’s interpreter as a bloody account of how he had killed Custer at the Little Bighorn. “No wonder then,” the Bull told me, “why I have been hissed and screamed at in some places. But I do wonder why that hasn’t happened when I spoke on other occasions. Can it be that I was not wrongly translated at all times? Or is it rather that at some places the people admired me for rubbing out Long Hair?” Sitting Bull by the way, though having predicted the defeat of the soldiers, wasn’t nowhere near Custer’s part of the field at the Greasy Grass. He never even crossed the river that day. Nevertheless most whites in that time believed he personally killed the General.

  But back to the present negotiations. The terms Cody offered was good money for the era, a fortune for someone in Sitting Bull’s position as an agency Indian still technically a prisoner of war: fifty dollars a week, plus a bonus of $125, plus all he could make selling his autographs; all this for a season of four months.

  But the chief still had his doubts. “I am no fool,” he says to me. “I know that money is good to have, but to be given it just to sit and have people stare at you is strange.”

  “It is interesting for them.”

  “It seems to be, but I don’t understand it.”

  “If you were white,” I said, “you would not put Sitting Bull on display. You would rub him out and be done with him.”

  “That is true, but since I am who I am, it is a waste of time to talk about the impossible.”

  Now, see, that’s another Indian thing: you could speak about dreams, visions, and the like all you wanted, but they figured it pointless to mess with reality. I don’t know as how any white person, including even me, can understand the distinction altogether, but there is one. I can’t tell you often enough that while talking to an Indian was sometimes exasperating, it seldom failed to refresh my mind.

  But anyway so as not to hurt my feelings he says, “The Shyelas taught you well.” He meant my knowing he would kill a defeated enemy and not keep him around for show, and he would do this not only for his own self-respect but also for that of his adversary. This concept may not be as nice as you’d like, involving as it might the splitting of a skull with a hatchet, which ain’t so neat a means of killing as a lead slug, but there’s a human belief behind it and not just stupid barbarism.

  At that point I recalled my promise to Annie, and I remembered her to him. “Watanya Cecilla sends you her rega
rds.”

  At which Sitting Bull rose to his feet, real graceful, thickset though he was and not in his earliest youth, and rummaging amongst the bundles that comprised his worldly goods, found something and brung it back and handed it to me.

  It was one of them souvenir cards Frank had printed up bearing Annie’s likeness. This one was signed with pen and ink:

  To Chief Sitting Bull, with every good wish from his friend, “Little Sure Shot”

  Annie Oakley

  “Are you also a friend of Little Sure Shot?” he asked me.

  “Yes, I am,” I says, “and she will be very pleased if you join Pahaska’s show.”

  “Then I will do so,” said Sitting Bull.

  And that’s the way it happened, and he brung some other Hunkpapa Sioux along with him, men and women, and that season of 1885 was a big success for B.B.W.W., finally turning a profit of, so they said, a hundred thousand dollars, having played in forty-odd places including amongst them a number in Canada, where on account of the Canadians was never at war with the Bull, and in fact was proud they had give him and his band a refuge after the Greasy Grass fight, his reception was generally better than in American cities, where he was sometimes booed and hissed for killing Custer, but he took this with what the newspapers of the day saw as the “typical stoicism” of the old redskin.

  Finally, though, one place or another in the States—I often lost track of where we was at any given time on a schedule like that, sometimes traveling every second day—in some interview between performances he was asked if he ever regretted massacring the General, the old Bull jumps up from his seat and he points a finger at the questioner. I translate what he said as follows.

  “You fool! Custer was not murdered. He was rubbed out in a fight in which he killed as many of us as he could. I have answered to my people for the dead on my side. Let Custer’s defenders answer for the dead on his. I will say no more about this matter.”