Return of Little Big Man

by Thomas Berger

  There was quite a crowd out at the funeral, including my brother Bill and Nell his big girlfriend, and I’ll say this for her: she kept him sober so he acted with proper respect for the occasion, though without alcohol in his veins he had begun to look real pale and weak.

  Once Wild Bill had been lowered into his mountainside grave, the assembled throng rushed back in a mob to the town saloons and had I not been quick on my feet I’d of been trampled down. Within a few seconds nobody was left but Charley Utter and, standing back a ways in respect, me. Charley had found a rock and was using it to hammer a flat board into the earth at one of its short ends. When he finished, I went close enough to where I could read what was cut or really scratched into the wood with a knifepoint. I can’t quote it verbatim after all these years, but I do recall that after giving Wild Bill’s age and day of death at the hands of Jack McCall, Charley Utter had wrote, “Goodbye Pard Till We Meet in the Happy Hunting Ground.”

  I was right affected by the sentiment. Them two really was good friends, unlike me and Wild Bill, who I knew for a number of years but would have to admit not closely for all that. In fact I was privately critical of him for a large part, maybe mostly because of envy, even though all in all he done me a number of favors. It was different with Custer, who I never much liked but who I realized, seeing him die, had been more than what I thought he was when I hated him most. I doubt I ever could of been Custer’s friend in the best of times—and to be fair to the man, what would he have seen in me? But it might of been different with Wild Bill. Fact is, nearest I ever come to having any friends was amongst the Cheyenne, and there race came into play sooner or later, even with Old Lodge Skins, who was more of a father than a friend anyhow. I just wasn’t an Indian, but I sure hadn’t done well amongst whites.

  Charley had been alone with his thoughts, but when he turned to head back to his camp, he noticed me. Now, in distinction to the way he acted in the No. 10 Saloon just after Wild Bill was murdered, he narrows his eyes to mean slits, and he says, with real bad feeling, a hand on the butt of the gun in the holster at his hip, “If I ever see you again, I’ll kill you.”

  “What?” I was not prepared for this.

  “You heard me.”

  “You said you wasn’t blaming me,” I reminded him.

  “I wasn’t standing by his grave at the time,” said Charley Utter. “God damn you.”

  “All right,” I told him. “I got it coming, I admit, and you have a right to hold me responsible. I do myself. I’m leaving Deadwood directly anyway, to keep the promise I made to Wild Bill not an hour before he died: to travel to Cincinnati and see his wife. I wanted to ask you: I seen you cut that lock of hair from Bill’s head before the coffin was nailed shut, and Doc Peirce said it was for Mrs. Agnes. I know you don’t think much of me, but would you trust me to take it to her?”

  Charley drew his pistol. “By God, I think I’ll kill you anyway. You rotten little son of a bitch, to stand there and lie through your teeth on a sad occasion like this.” His eyes was bulging with fury, and I judged it would not be long before he couldn’t restrain his trigger finger, so I didn’t try to make the point that he ought to first shoot Jack McCall, but went away as ordered and kept going without looking back, taking the shortest route out of town. I expected my brother and Nell was in one of the saloons. Well, I didn’t have time to say goodbye.

  It was on the trail just outside Deadwood, now become a crude road by reason of the deep ruts resulting from all the gold-rush traffic, I heard some barking behind me and turned and seen that yellow dog formerly partnered with my brother Bill but who was now taking up with me. I was glad to have his company, though I could not right away meet his expectation I was a sure source of grub, for I never had any myself at that point, facing the long hike to Fort Laramie, the nearest white place. In fact I had little more means than I had arrived in Deadwood with a couple of days before, except that roll of money I was supposed to take across the continent to Mrs. Hickok.

  ... Well, as it turned out, I didn’t have that either. I searched my person four or five times, but I no longer was in possession of the nest egg Wild Bill had put aside for his widow. I must of lost it on that chase of Jack McCall, maybe when I pulled out my knife. Or maybe someone picked my pocket at some point, could even have been at the funeral, for in them days there was a lot of rotten people around when you wasn’t on the lookout for them, but maybe that’s always the case in any age.

  So that was the real end of Wild Bill Hickok, who unfortunately won’t be coming back again in my story. He was the third of the influential people in my life who had died in hardly more than a month, and the only one with regard to which I felt guilty. How much was in that roll I never knew, never having counted it, but I intended to take some amount of money to the bereaved Mrs. Agnes soon as I earned enough, living up to that promise.

  In the days to come I heard about what happened to Jack McCall, who was tried right away for the cold-blooded murder committed before the eyes of a dozen witnesses, but was found not guilty by a jury of Deadwood miners, a number of who even cheered him on announcing their verdict, and despite all the threats by Wild Bill’s friends, the murderer left town with his skin intact.

  But before long it was determined that the first trial had been illegal, due to Deadwood’s own illegality as a town, being part of an Indian reservation! Which was real ironic, for none of the Americans would of been there, including General Custer, had the treaty forbidding them from the area not been broken when gold was discovered in the Black Hills on land guaranteed to belong to the Sioux unto eternity.

  Anyway, a few weeks later Jack McCall was rearrested and retried in Yankton, and they hanged the bastard. Nobody ever knew for sure why he did the deed, and his own explanation was a barefaced lie: he never had a brother for Wild Bill to kill. Probably he was hired by people who was afraid Wild Bill Hickok would bring law to unlawful Deadwood—there’s another example of how reality can be at odds with what’s supposed to be.

  I’ll tell you what I had in mind now, with no serious means for bringing it about at this time: looking up Mrs. Elizabeth Custer and consoling her. I say that with all respect.

  3. Bat Masterson

  LIKE ALL MY INTENTIONS regarding the Custers—like that time I intended to assassinate General George A.—this one had to be delayed in execution, me being at the moment on the trail to Fort Laramie, owning nothing but the clothes on my back, unarmed except for that Indian knife, and with no better prospects than I had on reaching Deadwood. The last time I seen her, Mrs. Libbie Custer was up at Fort Abraham Lincoln, Montana Territory, from which her husband had marched away never to be seen again amongst the living. It was not the time to head up there, through hundreds of miles of country where the war between the hostiles and the U.S. Army sure had not ended with the Indian victory at the Greasy Grass, and the Fifth Cavalry was in fact going north along more or less the same route I was traveling going south, as I found when I finally reached Laramie, but it was easy to miss even a large collection of people or animals in the wide open spaces of that day, unmarked by the billboards and Burma-Shave signs that come later along with foot-long hotdogs and soft ice cream squirted out of a machine.

  Such delicacies come to mind on account of I was in the same need of finding food again as I had been before arriving at Deadwood, or sure would of been were it not for my new supplier, namely that dog what had left the company of my brother Bill for mine, which was so far nameless. My main experience with this type of animal had been when amongst the Cheyenne, who carry a lot of dogs with them at all times but generally don’t make pets so don’t give them names. They put dogs to work, hauling smaller travois, and on occasion, usually a celebratory feast of some kind, knock a puppy in the head, singe off its hair, boil it up, and eat it. From the redskin point of view this is practical, not cruel, and my own position on the matter was as usual divided: when amongst Indians I ate dog if it was offered, yet when with whites I would never of though
t of doing so.

  But what about now, when I was real hungry soon enough after leaving town, with no weapons with which to acquire meat and no place to buy, beg, borrow, or steal even a plate of beans? Unless you been in a similar situation you don’t know what it’s like to have to personally catch or gather every morsel of food you swallow. Sure, you can locate a springy bough and make a bow of it with your shoelace, find some flint and chip a point from it then tie it to a straight twig, and with such an arrow drop an elk or antelope, and your problem’s gone. I estimate to accomplish this wouldn’t take no longer than a month or two. Or you spear a mess of fish—if there happens to be fish in the streams you come across. Incidentally, the Cheyenne was one of the few Plains tribes that would catch and eat fish, dating from the ancient days when they lived in the lake country, before the coming of the horse. But fish like game was not always to be found.

  However, as it turned out with that dog, I didn’t have nothing to complain of, as I first realized when, not far along the trail, he run off on his own and, not long after I figured I’d seen the last of him, he returns with his teeth sunk in the nape of a limp jackrabbit of a sufficient size, when roasted over the little fire I started (real little because you never knew who it might attract), to feed us both. He thereby proved, and confirmed it further as we proceeded, that he was a real partner, catching our red meat all the way to Laramie, jackrabbits, prairie dogs, and the like, being partial to that with hair on it, which is to say he just backed up, barking, at rattlesnakes, which was left to me to kill with knife and forked stick, but he weren’t shy about eating the result, which when cooked is real palatable, but if you ever offer any to a white woman you better say it’s chicken. Anyhow, seeing the kind of association we had established, I gave him the name of Pard.

  At Fort Laramie the talk was all about the aforementioned Fifth Cavalry, which in July had departed from there to get the Cheyenne what had illegally bolted from the nearby Red Cloud agency to try to join the hostiles up in the Little Bighorn region. At a place called War Bonnet Creek, William F. Cody, so-called Buffalo Bill, who returned briefly from what had become his full-time career of showmanship in the East to serve as Army scout, supposedly had a personal fight with a Cheyenne called Yellow Hand. There was many accounts of this incident from the first, beginning with them that claimed to be eyewitnesses, with the most lavish coming from Cody himself, which had him in a hand-to-hand with knives, concluding with lifting Yellow Hand’s bloody hair and crying, “The first scalp for Custer!” This is naturally the one given in dime novels and the later moving-picture shows. I got to know Cody right well in future years, but wasn’t at this event, for which I heard he wore one of his theatrical costumes, a black-and-red velvet Mexican suit with silver buttons and lace, and a enormous big-brimmed hat of the kind favored south of the border, so I can’t comment except to say there was a lot of people, including Yellow Hand’s own sister, who said Buffalo Bill never did it. I mention this because it was typical of everything that ever happened in the West that became famous. You don’t know what the truth was unless you was there—like me, on so many well-known occasions, and I never claim anything I can’t vouch for, like the Cody–Yellow Hand combat. It is especially hard to determine what was or was not true about Bill Cody, one of the greatest masters of the art of throwing buffalo chips who ever lived, in a time when there was a lot of competition.

  I know there’s some of you saying, “Of which you, old boy, might be the last living example.” If so, just listen to what I tell you, and then check it against the facts if you can.

  My trouble, most of my life, was nobody would listen. You recall Wild Bill wouldn’t let me tell him about being with Custer at the Greasy Grass. Well, this continued. Occupied at Deadwood with my brother Bill and then Hickok’s last days on earth, I hadn’t encountered talk about the destruction of most of the Seventh Cavalry by the Sioux and Cheyenne but at Laramie that was still the main topic, and of course there wasn’t nobody representing the redskin side of the argument, least of all the tame Indians what was called Hang-Around-the-Forts because there was a lot of them still doing that, begging for whiskey, et cetera. This was definitely not the place to reveal my intimate experience of the fighting Cheyenne, but I could and did try to tell a few folks I knowed Custer well, starting out at that, with an intention of going on, but everyone was sick of the many impostors already circulating, hardly two months since the event, claiming to have survived the Little Bighorn battle. Anyway, all anybody wanted to talk about was how there wasn’t any longer no excuse for not just wiping out every rotten dirty Indian in the country. We tried to get along with them, and look what happened! The men who expressed this feeling strongest was, as always, them so drunk they could hardly stand up, let alone take on the savages.

  Me and Pard didn’t linger long at Laramie. For one, the dog couldn’t do much hunting at or around the fort, owing to the commotion there, and I still never had no money, having, properly, not been paid by Colorado Charley for bodyguarding Wild Bill the day he was murdered. I was once again in my familiar need of a profitable occupation, and I thought the pickings might be better down at the town of Cheyenne, which had been a growing place on my visit of the previous spring and was surely even more so by now, for that’s how it went in them days and those parts.

  When me and Pard got there, indeed I saw a city of some fifteen thousand souls, with all manner of shops, eateries, dance halls, variety theaters, gambling places, sporting houses, everything men really like but little of what’s supposed to be good for them. The latter was sure to come, given the natural progression in human affairs, usually due to the arrival of respectable women, like mothers and schoolteachers and churchgoers, them who believe life ought to be more than the mere pleasuring of the lowest appetites which uninstructed men think is just fine. But this has even been true of the more than a few harlots I have known: they was always saving up some kind of nest egg for when they left the profession and settled down with a fine decent man and raised a family, and what’s more, some of them actually done as much.

  In some ways I was not much better prepared for civilization than an Indian, with the difference that I was white and therefore, if ever the target of hatred or contempt on the part of the civilized, it was only personal and not general. Also, I had a term or two in decent society, beginning when I was the adopted son of the Reverend and Mrs. Pendrake, which also represented the only period of formal book-learning I ever endured. Then there was the time I was in the trading business with Bolt & Ramirez in Denver and thought I had settled down with a Swedish-immigrant wife named Olga, but she and our boy, little Gus, was captured by the Indians, who I myself rejoined from time to time, by fate and not by choice, for I could recognize there wasn’t no future in barbarism however attractive it might at times seem.

  Looking at the main street of Cheyenne, I realized that I had to find me a more profitable kind of life than heretofore. I was real tired of being hungry, broke, and dirty and not having a shelter against the elements, which was unruly in my part of the world that summer, with storms of rain and hail.

  “Pard,” I says to my canine pal, who had got chilled and soaked along with me, “we got to find a way to get in on this prosperity.” He was a good listener but being a dog was not equipped to understand as I did that any number of them frequenting these pleasure palaces was likely to be no more prosperous than me, but simply able to put up a better front.

  While I was standing there, thinking, being careful to keep out of the way of more affluent-looking passersby, what does Pard do but approach a dandified sort of fellow with derby hat, stickpin, and gold-headed walking stick. Now Pard was right friendly, but I was afraid a man dressed like that might get the wrong impression when approached by a mutt, maybe take a swipe at him with that stick, so I moves up to defend my pal if so.

  But this fellow, who wore the standard droopy mustache of the day, just smiled down at the dog, then at me.

  He says, “H
e looks like he could use a good feed.”

  “I expect he could,” says I. “Him and me just come in off the trail from Laramie, and there ain’t much game around.”

  “Lots of people have gone that way for gold,” says he. “That was the reason I came here, but before I could get outfitted to haul up to Deadwood, a lot of them started to come back. They say all the good claims are gone and the vein is already running thin.”

  “That’s where I come from myself,” I told him. I was trying to decide whether to say much further when he up and asks me if I happened to be at Deadwood when Wild Bill Hickok was shot.

  I decided on caution. “I might of been.”

  He grins under his black mustache. “What kind of answer is that? Either you were or were not.”

  Now speaking well as he did, and being so nicely dressed, he was a far cry from the usual type I run into. In fact he struck me as probably hailing from back East, like one of them writers what came West looking for colorful topics to write about for the cake-eaters in the big cities. He didn’t look like no sissy, being of a husky build though of the middle height, and talking in a straightforward manly way. But I decided he was likely a tenderfoot in matters pertaining to the frontier and therefore just the right person to tell my story to, and not just about Wild Bill but also Custer and all. I starts in, but he says his whistle could use some wettening and he’d be glad to buy me one as well.

  Pard was already lowering his head and long nose, giving me a dirty look from the tops of his eyes, because by now he could foresee things in that canine way. “Sorry,” I told him, “saloons and gambling halls are just for them with two feet, probably to their detriment. You’re lucky to get to stay outdoors. Just wait here for me. If you spot somebody with a drawn gun, you run away and hide.”