Return of Little Big Man

by Thomas Berger

  Doc Powell’s latest project sounded sensible enough, at least when I was drunk, and also remember that Bill Cody was his partner: it was to colonize a couple million acres of undeveloped land down in Mexico that was free for the taking. Now, sneer if you will, but at the time it sure seemed like just the kind of thing that might appeal to a lot of foreigners in Europe who would want to get off to a fresh start in the New World, and this spot would be the newest part, starting from scratch. White Beaver was going overseas with us to sign up colonists.

  That’s right, Cody was taking the Wild West across the ocean again in the spring, this time to Paris, France, and another celebration, which had a French name pronounced Eck-spoh-ziss-ee-awn Oon-ee-vair-sell, spell it as you will, and we’ll get to that directly. But first I want to dispose of the matter of money, though I can’t do it as thoroughly as my own savings was disposed of in this scheme: in a word, though this is jumping ahead some, Doc Powell couldn’t find nobody in Europe or anyplace else who wanted to colonize that acreage of Mexican desert. I had nobody to blame but myself, and Cody lost a lot more than I did. But he had a whole lot else.

  Now I know what you’re thinking at this point: you’re tired of hearing how once again Mrs. Agnes Hickok never got reimbursed for Wild Bill’s roll which I lost while in hot pursuit of his murderer Jack McCall. It’s beginning to sound like I made all this up! Well, I was ahead of you, way back then. I myself got sick of being a welcher. Before giving a cent to White Beaver, I divvied up my savings into two equal portions. In five years with the Wild West, I had saved almost two hundred fifty dollars. I know that don’t sound impressive these days, but in that age you could buy a meal for ten cents, so such a sum was not to be despised. What I done was round out Mrs. Aggie’s share to an even one twenty-five and send it off in cash to the Cincinnati address I had gotten from her daughter Emma the Champion Equestrienne of the World. I hope it reached her. I never knew. I included a note in which, after apologizing for poor grammar and worse spelling, I said I had been a pard of Wild Bill’s many years before and owed him a poker debt, which I was long last able to return. I never said it was a dying request, for I was ashamed to have taken so long to fulfill it, and for the same reason did not sign my name.

  So I had finally accomplished both the obligations I had took upon myself on leaving Deadwood a dozen years before with regard to the two widows, Mrs. Custer and Mrs. Hickok, though as usually happens in life the realization was somewhat different than the intention. I don’t know what I had in mind in connection with Libbie Custer before meeting her, beyond being her sincere friend, but I had not exactly hit it off with the lady. As for Agnes Hickok, I had wanted to provide her with a considerably larger bequest, regardless of how much was in the roll Wild Bill had entrusted to me, but it was the best I could do.

  Now, getting back to B.B.W.W, off we went to Europe again on the same Persian Monarch we come back on the year before, with two hundred persons, almost half of which was Indians, some fifty buffalo amidst an animal cargo of three hundred, the Deadwood stagecoach and the other equipment, and while the crossing weren’t as rough as the first time, I never got used to traveling on water. I had first went West as a young boy in a so-called prairie schooner, but I tell you, going over the bumpiest ground, you could stop at any time. Stop on the ocean, you’re still there.

  You got to bear with me when it comes to French names and places. “Paris” was simple enough to figure out even though they said it with an ee at the end, and the harbor where we landed, the “Harve” (though Americans would of said “Harb”) made sense, but where we set up the encampment on reaching Paris was in a park with a funny name on the order of “Annoying,” though I gather it didn’t mean that in French, and the iron tower what had lately been put up, so high you could see it from everyplace in town, had the right name in the English version, the “Eye-full,” but even the Frenchmen who liked it called it something that sounded like “Awful.” And by the way, a lot of them hated it even though it was the tallest manmade structure in the world, which was true of them people on almost every subject. Whereas in England everybody seemed to agree on basic matters, at least in public, the French made a specialty of disagreeing with one another on almost anything.

  Eventually I found out that some of this was not what it seemed, but due to the language, which is more excited-sounding than ours and makes a lot of next to nothing, like “Good morning, sir” is just a mumble compared to Bone-JOO, mess-YEAR, which can be like a song. And a good many of their words though sounding like some in English, have different meanings, for example to us “assassin” would be John Wilkes Booth who killed Mr. Lincoln, but in Paris it meant only the driver of a cab whose trotting horse almost run you down when you tried to cross the road.

  They had a lot of funny ways, which shouldn’t of been surprising, because after all they was French, and though they was nice and hospitable when we got to Paris, I had the feeling they was suspicious about what it was exactly that a performance of ours consisted of and whether they should like it and why, for I found there was nobody like a Frenchman for taking nothing for what it appeared to be and reserving judgment till he decided if he was being made a fool of or not. So at the opening performance, with their President, Mr. Carnot, and a lot of other big shots on hand, for that Exposition commemorated their Revolution of a hundred years earlier, there was an audience numbering twenty thousand people, and they wasn’t unfriendly, but neither did they show anything near the excited expectation that always greeted us at home and maybe even more so amongst the British, who was supposed to be restrained, as opposed to the hotblooded folks across the English Channel, which by the way ain’t called that by the French, who was always thinking about food, but rather the “Munch.”

  As promised, Annie and Frank was back with the show. They had straightened out whatever difficulty they had with Cody, and Lillian was gone now, so there was Little Sure Shot, waiting for her entrance into the arena in Paris, and me and Frank was in attendance, ready with her guns, ammunition, a supply of them glass balls, and other equipment for the act, and I tell you she had stayed as pretty as she was when she first joined B.B.W.W. but had become even more accomplished as a performer, having acquired an ability to take hold of a crowd by simply walking in in her demure way, wearing that fringed outfit and star-marked hat, them neat little shoes and leggings, curtseying like a well-brought-up schoolgirl of the kind Libbie Bacon must of been not too many years before she married Autie Custer. Long before Frank handed her the gun and I throwed the first glass ball into the air, Annie would have an audience eating out of her hand.

  But on this occasion, with the French still reserving judgment on the Wild West, Annie took it as a personal challenge to take them on, all twenty thousand. She had noticed that for the opening ceremonies, the audience applauded only when certain persons posted here and there throughout the arena give them the okay to do so by starting up the cheering. Later on we found out that every show in France, from circuses to highbrow plays, hired fellows of this type, who was called “clackers,” and once some Frenchman told me, with typical Paris humor tending towards the cynical, that after an act or two you could tell from the level of noise exactly how much the clackers had been paid on each occasion.

  Anyway, Annie took this as an affront to her professional pride.

  “Go on, Frank,” she says, “you and Jack tell them to keep quiet.”

  Knowing Frank didn’t want to rile her before a performance, I took it upon myself to point out there was a number of such people: the show’d be over before we went through a crowd that size.

  There was sparks in her eyes. Annie wasn’t really a shy schoolgirl. “Well, Jack,” she says, “if you ever bothered to look, you could see the main ones are right close. You go over to them and you tell them to hush. Now is that too much to ask of you two?”

  If you have had experience in entertainment, you know performers are real highstrung just before going on, so I quick followed Frank
, who being married to her had already started off, and being a clear-thinking man, had already figured out a practical answer to the problem, neither of us speaking French: he got one of the English-talking officials assigned to us to deal with the matter, and it was taken care of.

  Which meant Annie come into the center of the arena to absolute dead silence. There wasn’t even any applause from the President’s box, where I heard later they thought Miss Oakley wanted complete quiet for some safety measure when shooting her firearms.

  Well, them show guns, even with their light loads, made enough noise to startle city folks when they first went off at every performance, and the Frenchies wasn’t any exception. Fact was, they turned out to be just as excitable as supposed, only took a while to show it, but pretty soon their yells and cheers was even drowning out Annie’s guns, and before her act was over, the whole bunch was on their feet screaming and throwing hats and parasols and scarves into the arena and at one another, and in general going nuts for her. It sounded like another revolution had started, a century after the first.

  If Annie was the toast of the town in New York and London, she was even more in Paris: the French toast, I called her, for them people always went any dish one better, like dipping it in egg, being crazy on the subject of food: you couldn’t get a piece of cheese in Paris, you had to name the kind, out of several hundred. You couldn’t buy butter unless you specified the fat content, for again there was a big choice. Incidentally, you couldn’t get “French toast” over there, where they call it, in their lingo of course, “lost bread.” And who else in all the world would eat liver raw?

  You ought to know the answer to that one: Indians, of course, though it would probably be that of a hairy four-footed animal rather than a goose, but sharing that trait weren’t the only connection between the red man and the French, who from the first had a spot soft in their hearts for Indians and generally got along better with them in the New World than the British. The French and Indian War was even before my time, but I know that them two was allies in it against the Redcoats, like the Americans was a little later with the French against the same enemy, so though the French was peculiar, we had old ties with them on our side of the water, including even many tribal names, among them Sioux, Assiniboine, Nez Perce, Iroquois, and others, for they was first visited by Frenchmen in the market for furs and also priests, who had enough sense to tell an Indian he didn’t have to quit his heathen beliefs to become a Catholic: God would let him be both, at least until he learned better.

  Speaking of Indians, who would turn up in Paris but Black Elk, one of them Sioux who, if you recall, missed the returning boat to the U.S.A. the year before and was stranded in England. Cody was relieved to see he was in good shape, for this was the kind of thing the reformers like Amanda could use to discredit putting Indians in shows, and invited him to take his old place in the troupe, but Black Elk said he was pretty homesick by now though he had had a nice time since the Wild West had sailed away without him, being hired right away by a fellow named Mexican Joe who run an imitation show of Cody’s though smaller, and they toured Germany and some other countries including one with a mountain which had smoke coming out of its top and sometimes, according to the people who lived there, it shot out flames and burned up the towns around its base.

  “Yet the people continued to live there,” said he. “Because it is their home.”

  “Tell my friend,” Cody says to me, “the name of that country would be Italy.”

  So I did so, and Black Elk says, “But most of the time we were here with the French, who treated us very well, and a young woman became my friend and took me to meet her family, but I missed my own home so much I got sick and fell down and, so far as these people could see, I died, not breathing and having no heartbeat, and they were getting ready to bury my body when I finally woke up, because I had not died but rather had flown across the seas to the Black Hills and then to Pine Ridge and visited with my mother before coming back here. I told her I would return in the body as soon as I had the money for the boat.”

  Cody now demonstrated again why the Indians liked and trusted him. “You’d better get started, then, for a man must always honor a promise he makes to his sainted mother.” And he give him a return ticket and ninety dollars, and got the French to provide one of them cops they call John Darms to go along and make sure he got on the right train and then caught the right ship on time.

  Now, just to follow up on that vision Black Elk had, I heard from some other Pine Ridge Lakota with the show in later years that having talked with her son in the same dream, Black Elk’s Ma knowed he was coming home and exactly when, and I had no reason not to believe that, having many times known like results from the dreams of Old Lodge Skins, the man who taught me most everything of enduring value I learned in life.

  In Paris, as in London, the B.B.W.W. Indians was taken around to see the sights, and reporters followed them everyplace, but not knowing the French language I couldn’t say whether the stories they wrote was any truer than anyplace else, but I doubt it, given the difference between the way an Indian looks at things and a fellow who tries to put it down in writing, for example when Red Shirt and some of the others went up to the top of the Eiffel Tower (me too, holding my breath on that elevator ride), Arizona John Burke went along with us and looking down remarked on what I guess there wasn’t a white man ever went atop any structure and didn’t say, which is how the persons below looked like ants, Red Shirt’s observation was how if the people down there looked so little from high up where he was, then how much smaller all people must look from the height of Wakantanka.

  Now that’s the way I translated it for Burke, who asks, “Where’s Wakanna?”

  Distracted from the view and also still shaky from that elevator, I done a careless job. “Sorry,” I says, “he means God.”

  And Burke says, “Here, here,” again using the British expression, and then I heard him tell the reporters what devout Christians our Indians all was, which was news to me, and Lord knows how it come out in print, for I never run into a Frenchman who claimed to know English who actually did, and the same thing was true in reverse, according to the French, who claimed there wasn’t anybody not born and brung up in France could hope to speak their tongue.

  As you can tell listening to this story, I couldn’t be called fluent in English, and Sitting Bull wasn’t never impressed by the quality of my Lakota, so on Judgment Day, talking to the Almighty, maybe I’d better stick to Cheyenne. Anyway I guess I was pretty pathetic with French, and them people prefer you didn’t even try it if you was going to butcher their beautiful language. What really went over in Paris was being as Western American as possible, that is, if you couldn’t be Indian, which was best of all, and everywhere you went you saw the locals wearing sombreros and headbands with feathers and riding horses on American horned saddles, and little kids with bows and arrows.

  So I had a real good time in that country, the details of which I won’t go into, but I was recovering from a great disappointment in the usual way a man does that, by means of what women see as empty frivolities though they usually figure in them, along with drink. Speaking of drink, Frenchmen do that all day long but generally with wine, so they ain’t really drunk but they ain’t cold sober either: they’re just French. And yessir, they really do eat frogs, though not at every meal.

  But France nor any other foreign place wasn’t much to Annie Oakley’s liking, she being of the old-fashioned red-white-and-blue sort of girl with an eye open for un-American immorality, but one thing that concerned her personally she found good for a laugh. The King of Senegal, a colored country in Africa owned by the French at the time, while visiting Paris attended a performance of the Wild West and was so taken with Annie that he come around to Buffalo Bill’s tent after the show, a real big heavy person in his fancy robes of spotted furs and gold jewelry, with a bodyguard of husky young black fellows and a white interpreter who translated his French, and what he says was he w
anted to buy Annie for a hundred thousand francs.

  Now I know Cody thought this real humorous, but he pretended to be insulted, so the King upped the ante, until Bill lifted his hands and called quits.

  “Madame Butler,” says he, “nor any other American lady can never be for sale, sir!”

  The King speaks to the translator, who then tells Cody, “His Majesty says, ‘Oh, what a pity!’”

  Bill turns his head towards me, with a hand covering his mustache and the top of his goatee, but got himself under control and turned back. “Ask him what he wanted to do with her.”

  “To keel teegers,” the Frenchman says after consulting with the King, who now is smiling eagerly with a display of perfect teeth.

  “Pardon?”

  “Wild bists. To shoot dem.”

  “To kill tigers?” Cody asks.

  “May wee,” says the King, and the interpreter explained, “They eat too many of his pipples.”

  “Captain Jack,” Cody asks me, “will you be so good as to go to Miss Oakley’s tent and fetch her here to receive this offer? It’s too attractive to dismiss out of hand.”

  So I done as requested, and the King repeated his proposal, and I’ll say this for Annie, she never got mad but just said politely she could not accept due to prior obligations. At which His Majesty parted his leopardskin robe and, amazingly graceful for a man of his bulk, knelt down on one bare knee, took her little surprised white hand in his big black one, raised it to his lips, and kissed it. Then he stood up, squared his shoulders, and marched out of the tent in a brisk military step, followed by his burly retainers.

  As soon as the group could be expected to have gone beyond earshot, Cody let out a big guffaw, and he says to Annie, “I know for a fact there aren’t any tigers in Africa. That’s according to my personal friend Mr. Theodore Roosevelt.”