Return of Little Big Man

by Thomas Berger

  Also there was a lot of politics in New York, or so I heard, for that’s what you get soon as a lot of people gather together, and if it was bad enough in Dodge and Tombstone, think what it would be here.

  But you can see me and New York having little in common as only to be expected in an ignorant hick like myself, and I won’t disagree. After all, Mrs. Libbie Custer found it the place where she could live the rest of her life, which ought to be recommendation enough. I reckon my own position on the matter was put by our leading Sioux, American Horse, when he was interviewed by some New York newspaper reporter, me translating.

  When asked what he thought of the place, that Ogallala said, “It is wonderful and strange, so much so that it often makes my head spin, and I wish I could go out in the woods and cover myself with a blanket and try to make sense of what I have seen.”

  Every once in a while somebody would get the bright idea to expose our Indians to the higher-minded areas of the local culture, and vice versa, and a delegation of them would be hauled around to places like churches, for example that one across the East River in Brooklyn where the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher sermonized at length on Sundays. Now you might think this was cruel and unusual punishment for them, but it was not. As I’ve said more than once, redskins had their own tradition for longwinded oratory, so they tended to respect others with enough energy to keep a monologue going, irrespective of what was being said, which in Beecher’s case they couldn’t understand a word of, and I couldn’t translate while he was talking and in fact didn’t see no purpose in even summing up when he was finally done, but they enjoyed it though being uncomfortable on them pews of hard wood, till I told them it was okay to take their blankets off and sit on them. But when they did so, they was naked to the waist and shocked some of the old biddies in the congregation, who complained to me.

  Another time we visited a school for children, and the Sioux sang their songs for the pupils, but when the principal wanted them to do a war dance, I turned him down after only pretending to ask them, for though they would of done it to be polite, I didn’t like them to be thought of as entertainers aside from their professional work with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. I mean, when Indians danced to work themselves up for war, it was serious: afterwards they went out and killed enemies and scalped them, which ain’t something that should be suggested to entertain American school kids, even though the children would of liked it.

  The Indians enjoyed such excursions, which included visits to the notable sights around the city like the Statue of Liberty, which took a bit of explaining on my part: no, there was never a real white woman nowhere near that big and it wasn’t a representation of George Washington’s wife or Ma or Grandmother England who ruled Canada, though some who had seen the picture on the Canadian medals give to them what went north with Sitting Bull swore she looked like the same person, who if she was so powerful a woman must be of a giant size (what a surprise they got when they met the real little Queen Victoria a few months later!). And while they was naturally homesick when in such foreign territory, they liked all the beef they got to eat and the money they made just for being Indians. Unlike the whites with the show, they wasn’t acting, except insofar as shooting blanks in the stage battles went. When the performances was over, Annie put away her guns and was Frank’s wife, and Cody went out to dinner with his swells, but the Indians stayed Ogallala and Pawnee. This might be why when they started making movies in Hollywood about the West, the leading redskins was seldom played by the real McCoy but rather by white actors who was gangsters in other pictures, because Indians playing Indians wasn’t make-believe.

  Maybe I should explain that better, but I want to get on with the story here and say that all of a sudden Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was attacked in the House of Representatives by some Congressman from Brooklyn for taking the Indians off their reservations to appear in a degrading spectacle for private profit. In that they was wards of the U.S. Government, this “Drama of Savagery” was being given under its auspices.

  Now Cody lost no time in getting his influential friends to counter this with testimonials as to the educational value of his “exhibition” for both whites and Indians, amongst them another Congressman who said bringing savages to the East to see its wonders would convince them of the foolishness of ever again becoming hostiles. And of course nobody was better at shoveling it than Buffalo Bill when defending his favorite cause. “The so-called savage sports,” he told some reporter, “are simply their everyday form of amusement in their own country.” He pointed out that what the Indians did while in New York, visiting churches and seeing uplifting sights, was morally elevating. And then he added what he seen as the clinching argument, since he couldn’t of said it for most of the whites with the show except Annie, least of all for himself: “Not one of them out of seventy-five or eighty has ever been known to be drunk since they came to this city.”

  Cody was especially concerned at this time, for the Indians was with the show only by permission of the Secretary of the Interior, and he wanted an okay to take them to England, along with the rest of the company, to perform daily for six months at a big American trade fair to be held during the celebration of Queen Victoria’s half-century on the throne, the so-called Golden Jubilee. This was the most ambitious stunt he ever dreamed up, and the North Platte Tribune come right out and said he expected to make barrels of money from it.

  Well, being such a successful public figure by now, he soon got the Government’s blessing, and we all sailed for the Old Country on the last day of March in 1887, more than two hundred strong, of which almost a hundred was Indians, on the S.S. State of Nebraska. There was also a dozen and a half of buffalo on board, a herd of deer and elk, a number of longhorn cattle, and a couple hundred horses, mules, and jackasses, along with the Deadwood coach and tons of painted backdrops representing the terrain of the American West.

  Now most of the Indians felt real queasy about this trip from the first, though as it turned out they wasn’t worried near enough about crossing the ocean, for we was in for a ride even the sailors admitted later was rougher than usual—and let me say right off, there wasn’t nobody on board no sicker than me. Like the Indians I begun the voyage with a sense of bad medicine. Most of this was because me and them hadn’t never been afloat on a body of water too big to see across, but I personally also felt superstitious when our Cowboy Band, up on the top deck as the boat pulled out into New York harbor, started playing “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” which happened to be what I heard the regimental band, not themselves going on the campaign, played as Custer led the Seventh Cavalry out of Fort Abe Lincoln towards the Little Bighorn. Not even thinking of the well-known indecent words to it, invented by forgotten soldiers, eased my mind now.

  It took only one look at the crowded aisles and tiny compartments in the innards of that ship to convince the Indians to camp on the open deck, and I joined them, but it was uncomfortable even before the big storm hit us about halfway through the two-week crossing, lasting a couple of days, and I tell you even worse than being seasick is being so while hearing Lakota death songs for forty-eight hours and seeing Red Shirt, the leader of the current Sioux contingent, examine himself every day to determine whether the dream he had was true: that going over the water would cause his flesh to decay and fall off his body.

  Even Cody was under the weather, no doubt soon learning, as I did, that though alcohol was the cure for snakebite, gunshot wounds, and consumption, it only made your heaving worse when you was tossed around on the briny. But wouldn’t you know the person who would come through it best was Annie Oakley, who wrapped in an oilskin, spent her time on the captain’s deck, watching him deal with the problem of keeping the ship afloat with a smashed rudder in an Atlantic storm. She was only disappointed at having to postpone the target practice she done from the deck on better days.

  Well, we finally reached England without loss of life, human or animal, but it took me a few days on land before I stopped feeling
I was still walking on a rolling ship and my appetite returned, but the Indians and Cody was quicker to recover, the former when it came to eating enough beef to replace what they had been too sick to swallow on board the boat, and Buffalo Bill regained not only his land legs but they was once again hollow when his English hosts was pouring at the big welcome celebration we was given.

  The Wild West encampment and show grounds was at a place name of Earl’s Court in the district called Kensington, west of what I thought of as downtown London, but the local English had their own terms for everything, such as the “City” as referring not to London in general but to their Wall Street. Anyway there was a lot of open land at Earl’s Court, and we occupied twenty-three acres of it, setting up a sizable American town there of tents and tepees, Old Glory flying from the flagpole, with thousands of English, children and grownups, gawking at us from the sidelines even during the times between performances.

  Cody was in his element with the British, even more so than he was back home, where he did have a certain competition from others also of frontier experience, but over here he was as special as you could get, and even before the official opening, a lot of swells cultivated his acquaintance and most of these had titles, beginning with the Prince of Wales, who got a dress rehearsal for himself and party, four days before anybody else got to see the show, which I believe come under the principle of “nobleness obliged,” that is, if you’re in some country where they got people with inherited ranks, you are obliged to please them, though I personally drawed the line at kissing anyone’s hindquarters and so wasn’t real happy when Cody asked me, of all people, to serve as guide or escort to the Prince while he was on the premises of the Wild West.

  “Aw, Bill,” I says, “I’m a redblooded American and don’t bow down to no foreign thrones, or however it goes. Ain’t you got nobody with better manners? Annie, for example.”

  “Missy has enough to do with her performance,” says he, “and so do Little California, Emma Lake, and the other riders. As to the cowboys, they are all pretty crude.” He said that to butter me up. “Besides,” and here he raised his goatee as if in pious thought, “I don’t know how close we should let our ladies come to His Royal Highness.”

  We had already heard of the Prince’s rep concerning the fair sex. “Annie’s got Frank to look after her,” I says. “And Lillian’s married now too.”

  Cody pours me another drink of Scotch whiskey, having exhausted the American stock as shipboard medicine for seasickness. At first it tasted bad enough to be used for a tonic, but it would warm you against the English weather, which had been rainy every day since we set foot in the country, shades of our time in New Orleans, though here the rainfall if not as forceful was even more persistent. “I don’t believe that makes much difference, Jack. He’ll be the next king of England, and we’re in his country and in fact need his patronage. I believe all purposes are best served by having somebody like yourself act as his escort and my personal representative. After all, you’ve been with the company since the outset and can explain every aspect of the exhibition, and you can interpret if he wants to meet the Indians, which I am told he very much looks forward to doing.”

  Before royalty went anywhere, I soon found out, a lot of flunkies got everything arranged in advance: where they will get out of their carriages, where they will walk and sit (and relieve themselves, which can’t be anyplace near where normal people do), and what to say when they talk to you, for you was supposed to wait till that happened and not start palavering on your own. Cody told me all of this, but I proceeded to forget most of it, being indignant that while it was true England was the Prince’s country, we was his guests and ought to be protected against making mistakes by the natural laws of hospitality, which I tell you Indians sure observed if you went to their camps.

  But before I get to my time with the Prince I want to speak of another concern. Cody had mentioned an Emma Lake as being amongst the female trick riders in our company, of which there was ten or twelve. There was too many people now in the Wild West for me to know them all or have occasion to recognize their names, and I hadn’t ever heard this one before. It rung a distant bell, though it might not of done so in any other association, for “Lake” was not that unusual a name, but put it with professional performance of horsemanship...

  I told Cody I would do my best to show the Prince around but not to expect me to remember every nicety asked for by these foreigners, and he says he had every confidence in me.

  Then I asks, “Who is this Emma Lake, Bill?”

  “The Champion Equestrienne of the World, Jack. She has appeared in Barnum’s Circus. Of course we’re billing her not with the name of Lake or her married name of Robinson but rather as Emma Hickok, daughter of my late friend, Wild Bill.”

  “You’re just making that up?”

  He winked. “Not exactly. Not long before he was assassinated, Bill Hickok married a former circus owner, herself a renowned equestrienne name of Agnes Thatcher, who before she married Mr. Thatcher had a husband named Lake and a daughter by him named Emma.”

  “She’s Wild Bill’s stepdaughter?”

  Cody winks again. “Not to the letter of the law, but you can appreciate that she could have been.”

  This news hit me totally by surprise. I hadn’t knowed Mrs. Agnes Lake Thatcher Hickok had ever had any offspring, let alone what had followed her Ma into trick riding, but then I never went out of my way to find out a whole lot about Wild Bill’s widow on account of losing that money he had entrusted me to give her in case of his death. That had happened so long ago now it was easy to avoid the subject in the forefront of my mind, but it was sure in the back of it somewhere. After bartending in Tombstone and then working with B.B.W.W. I had accumulated another of the little nest eggs I saved up at various points in my life, with that persistent idea of going into business for myself with a Western show of my own, like a number of fellows had done with a certain success though nowhere near Cody’s, for example, G. W. Lillie, who had been our Pawnee interpreter for a season or two, as usual acquiring a nickname, in his case “Pawnee Bill,” but most didn’t get far because, as I thought at the time, they didn’t have no famous performers. I on the other hand being so close to the Butlers was sure I could induce Annie to join my show, for she had begun to sour on Cody after he hired Lillian Smith and them female riders like Emma Lake Hickok. Annie was a sweet person except when she had competition, particularly of her own same sex.

  However, the arrival of this Emma reminded me of that long-standing debt. I never counted the wad of money Wild Bill give me, and didn’t have no idea how much it amounted to. I might put together another roll that was around the size and weight of the first, insofar as I could remember them, but of what denominations? Then too, I got to thinking: it had been a dozen years since Bill Hickok’s death. Hanging around Cody and Nate Salsbury, as I done in my spare time to pick up as much as I could of what I understood least, namely the commercial side of show business, I was aware that money don’t sit still over the years, or it shouldn’t. It ought to grow, at least getting interest in a savings bank. So I undoubtedly owed more to his widow than Wild Bill give me in ’76, however much that was.

  More of this subject later on, though, for the job of guiding the Prince of Wales around the Wild West took all my attention at the moment, so I’ll tell you about it.

  I expected him to show up with more than just himself, for a person in his position travels with servants to open doors and take away his hat and coat, pass him a clean snot rag every time he blows his honker, etc., but I wasn’t prepared for a quarter mile of carriages bringing along his Mrs. and three little kids, all four of which was princesses; his brother-in-law, also a prince but of Denmark and not England (which I wouldn’t of thought was allowed); and a number of other people wearing silk hats and having titles from all over the place, including I believe France, along with a set of flunkies for each titled person, so the party filled so much of our grandstand it co
uld of been a regular performance.

  Cody of course was first to meet them, sweeping off that extra-large sombrero he wore for the occasion and bowing till his goatee almost touched the ground, which was a kind of compromise between the greeting that a member of the Royal Family had coming, but which us Americans, who normally don’t bow down to foreign sovereigns, didn’t like to give, so Buffalo Bill done what he otherwise delivered from horseback to the entire audience at the beginning of each show.

  I’ll tell you them people couldn’t of been nicer, beginning with the Prince himself, who was a great big heavy fellow with a neatly trimmed beard and wearing regular gentleman’s clothes, high hat and tailcoat and all, and not the robe trimmed with snow weasel and the jeweled crown I expected, as the Indians sure did, or anyway some fancy outfit signifying his position.

  He was however the largest in his party, and he was quite a bit older than I thought somebody still a prince would be. Fact is, he should long since of been king had not his Ma lived so long, so that by the time he finally got the throne from her, not till ’01, he had only seven years of life left for himself. Now the old woman could of retired any time before this, but the talk was she wouldn’t do so on account of she never believed he had the right stuff for a monarch, having spent most of his life eating and drinking and frequenting females in the carnal fashion.

  But I ask what else was there to do when you were waiting to become king? For that matter, I never saw exactly what there was for an English monarch to do even when on the throne once George III had lost America, after which I understand he went nuts, but that might not of been true, for the same Limey what told me that said George happened to be a German. You heard as many tall stories in Europe as you did in the saloons out West.