Buffalo Girls

by Larry McMurtry

  So scared were the young soldiers to have an Indian with them that one night, camping on the Powder River, a ridiculous thing happened. Some of the young white soldiers were so terrified that he might wake up and scalp them that they slept with their guns cocked all night—a very bad practice, as was quickly proven. A young soldier with red hair must have had a bad dream; the dream upset him so that he discharged his gun while asleep. The bullet went through a passing sentry and hit a horse. The sentry lived but the horse died—it had been the favorite horse of a major, too. This showed how hard it was to predict what a bullet would do. The foolish young soldier was immediately put in chains. He was forced to ride in the wagon all day. No Ears rode in the same wagon and observed that the young soldier was so low in spirits that he would probably freeze on the first cold night unless covered up well. The boy’s spirit put off no more heat than a candle flame, and that would not be enough to keep him alive the next time a strong blizzard struck.

  “You should crawl up by a horse,” No Ears told the boy. “Look for a horse that’s lying down. Otherwise you might pass away.”

  “Don’t care if I do,” the boy said miserably. “I’m ruint now anyway. What will I tell my Ma if I’m court-martialed out? I’m the hope of my family.”

  An old sergeant named Grisom, with a fat brown mustache, came over and offered No Ears some coffee. He didn’t offer the sad boy any. No Ears had known Grisom for years. He had fought at the Washita, the Rosebud, and in many local encounters; there were rumors that he had been among the baby-killers at Sand Creek, but No Ears didn’t know about that. So many white people had done terrible things in those years that it was hard to keep straight who had committed disgraceful acts and who hadn’t. No Ears rather liked Grisom and hoped he had not killed any Indian babies at Sand Creek or elsewhere. Grisom had been with Crook the day No Ears came to camp and informed them that Custer was dead. Grisom was not very smart and had not believed the information.

  “There’s not enough Indians in this world to defeat George Custer,” he had said, foolishly.

  “Shut your damn trap, Sergeant,” Crook had said. Crook was smarter than Grisom, which is why he was the general. He knew perfectly well there were enough Indians in the world to finish Custer; after all, but for luck, the same plentiful Indians might have finished Crook himself on the Rosebud.

  “I think this boy was just scared,” No Ears said. He had been moved by the boy’s distress over having disappointed his family.

  “The idiot, he slept with his gun cocked,” Grisom said. “It’s a good thing the horse died and not the sentry, or we would already have hung this young sprout.”

  No Ears got down and walked with Grisom for a while. Grisom had a horse but was walking in order to keep his feet warm. It was so cold that the little clouds made by the freezing breath of all the horses made walking tricky. The horses produced such clouds of vapor that no one in the rear of the column could see anything. Grisom seemed in low spirits; indeed, all the soldiers seemed in low spirits. It was apparent that most of the soldiers didn’t really enjoy their work, now that there was no fighting. They were almost as demoralized as the people in the poor villages along the Platte. The war might have been pretty bad, with many severe things done and much bloodshed, but at least war kept people alert; it sharpened their spirits.

  That night, several of the older soldiers invited No Ears to share their supper. They were all experienced men and knew that he was not going to attack the force with one shotgun or sneak around scalping them during the night. All the men seemed excited to be talking to a Sioux of some age and experience; just having No Ears in camp reminded them of the old days, when life had been more exciting for soldiers. Before they had been talking very long, it became apparent to No Ears why Cody’s idea of a show worked so well. The soldiers going up Powder River—at least the older soldiers—were so excited to be talking about old times and battles of the past that No Ears had no doubt they would have paid money to see Cody’s show. At first, when No Ears described the show, some of the men had been skeptical, but when he talked about some of the Indians who were there, particularly Sitting Bull, Cuts the Meat, and Red Shirt, their skepticism diminished.

  “Did Sitting Bull kill anybody while he was in England?” Grisom asked. “I always did consider him a dangerous foe.”

  “He would have liked to kill the warthog,” No Ears said. “It was a very ugly hog. But he behaved well with the people, and the Queen gave him a saber.”

  “I bet he’ll cut a throat or two with her dern saber before he’s through,” a fat old corporal remarked.

  “No, he is very well-behaved now, he likes white people’s money,” No Ears said. It irked him that the soldiers were so in awe of Sitting Bull—not a particularly deserving chief, in his view.

  Then a lanky man with only one arm began to question him about Crazy Horse; he said he had heard Crazy Horse was still alive in a secret part of Canada, and would sweep down from the north someday with an army so determined that the war he was planning would make the Custer battle seem like nothing.

  No Ears had not actually seen Crazy Horse’s body, but he had heard detailed accounts of his death from many reliable sources—it puzzled him that the white soldiers were so poorly informed. Hundreds of people, both red and white, knew exactly what had happened to Crazy Horse; there was really no excuse for these rumors that the man was alive. The notion that he was lurking with thousands of braves somewhere in the north was so ridiculous that No Ears didn’t bother to say much about it. He decided later that the reason the soldiers wanted to believe Crazy Horse was alive, or that Sitting Bull would break free again, was that they were just so bored. They were soldiers without a war—and yet the only reason for being a soldier was to make war. Who could blame the soldiers for being bored when all they had to do was haul flour or molasses from one fort to another?

  After a while, most of the soldiers became too drunk to talk. Grisom was not quite too drunk to talk, but he said things that were so stupid that No Ears began to wish he would drink a little more and pass out. Grisom could not get Crazy Horse off his mind and kept repeating ridiculous rumors about Crazy Horse’s having been seen in cities like Denver—a place Crazy Horse would never go even if he were alive.

  “I was with Crook,” Grisom said several times, as if No Ears lacked memory rather than ears.

  “They don’t make ’em like Crook anymore,” Grisom added. “Crook knew his business.”

  Personally No Ears thought Grisom overrated Crook, who, in his view, had just been an ordinary general; he had barely survived the Rosebud and had taken an awfully long time to catch Geronimo—and then had only done so by breaking his word.

  Still, No Ears knew that it was in the nature of soldiers to overrate the generals whose skill and knowledge they depended upon. All soldiers liked to believe their generals were smart; it made them feel they had a better chance of living awhile.

  His own people did much the same, overrating chiefs whose skills were rather ordinary. If Geronimo had taken the trouble to think, he would have known Crook meant to break his word and would never have walked into the trap. Sitting Bull had gone to Canada and had been starved out, although Canada was known to be a place where game was scarce, and Black Kettle had let the foolish Custer ride into camp and kill him on the Washita, although he had plenty of warning that Custer meant to do just that.

  Finally Grisom did pass out; he rolled over on his face, almost in the fire. No Ears had to drag him a foot or two back or sparks from the crackling fire might have set him aflame during the night.

  Later, observing that several of the young soldiers still slept with their guns cocked, No Ears decided to leave, and to travel no more with soldiers. The comfort of a wagon ride was not worth the aggravation of having to sleep around frightened young whites who might have bad dreams and fire off their guns without even waking up to see who they might be shooting. Also, he was tired of having to be polite while the white soldiers w
ere talking nonsense about people who were dead, or overpraising ordinary figures who still happened to be alive.

  Later that night, taking care not to walk in front of any young soldier who looked as if he might be having an uneasy dream, No Ears left camp. There was only a little snow on the ground, and he made good time. It pleased him that he was still able to travel so efficiently. Travel with soldiers was never efficient. They took half the morning to get their teams hitched, and then made camp much too early in order to start getting drunk and talking nonsense.

  The next day, taking advantage of a shortcut he knew, No Ears crossed Crazy Woman Creek and happened to notice a sage bush that looked familiar. It startled him a little, for it was the very sage bush he had hidden behind to watch the cranes. No cranes were feeding in Crazy Woman Creek that day, and there was nothing to worry about that he could see, but he felt a little uncomfortable anyway. It was not wise policy to keep showing up in places where disquieting or threatening things had occurred. The cranes might not manage to snatch your soul on the first try, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t succeed in snatching it if given a second chance.

  No Ears resolved to avoid that shortcut in the future. He hurried on toward the Black Hills. One of the soldiers had told him that Martha was living there with her friend Dora. The soldier had been there and had beaten Martha at cards.

  Not long before he got to Belle Fourche he encountered three moose grazing on the side of a hill. He had never seen moose in the Black Hills before and found their presence startling. With so many miners and hunters around, it seemed odd that the moose hadn’t been killed. They were large moose and represented a lot of meat, but his shotgun was behaving more weakly than ever and he felt it would be unlikely he could bring a moose down with it. After watching the moose for a while he decided they were just lost. Moose were very foolish; these had probably wandered hundreds of miles from home and now had no idea how to get back.

  It was after dark when No Ears walked into Belle Fourche. He had no trouble locating Martha Jane because her big black dog was standing on the porch of a house. The dog smelled him and immediately began to bark. No Ears said a few words to the dog before knocking on the door. A giant opened the door, which startled No Ears considerably. He was prepared for Doosie, who often lectured him on habits she didn’t like, but he was not prepared for a giant and was about to turn and go when Martha spotted him through the open door.

  “Here you are—I’ve been wishing you’d come!” she said, grabbing him and pulling him into the kitchen. Dora was there—she was heavy with child—and Bartle came in when Martha called him. Bartle did not look well—he seemed drunk, and Martha smelled drunk. No Ears had lived almost entirely outdoors on his walk from the Mississippi, and the hot air in the kitchen made him feel a little faint. Still, there was one important piece of information he felt he should deliver, in case the heat caused him to pass out.

  “I saw three moose this morning,” he said. “I think they are lost, but they are fat moose. Maybe tomorrow some of us can go kill them.”

  “I guess that drunk miner knew what he was talking about—what kind of hunters does that make us, Bartle?” Calamity said.

  9

  AS HER TIME CAME NEAR, DORA BEGAN TO WISH BLUE would appear. She began to dream of him almost every night—some of the dreams were so pleasant that she tried to cling to sleep, hoping to stay in them a little longer. Others were less pleasant—either she or Blue seemed to be leaving. In several dreams she was on the steamboat, going downriver, and Blue wasn’t with her—no one was with her. After those dreams she woke up feeling dizzy and confused. Often she cried.

  In fact, she cried so much in the mornings that everyone began to avoid her. Ogden got up early and started his chores earlier than usual in order not to be caught in the bedroom when Dora began to cry. Doosie brought her coffee and turned and left, unwilling to stay around someone who was so irrationally sad. Calamity often slept through the mornings. Generally, by noon, Dora’s mood had improved, so Calamity seldom saw her crying. But she heard about it from Doosie and knew that Dora’s mood was not the best.

  “Don’t you want the baby?” Calamity finally asked. She had encountered Dora looking puffy-eyed once too often.

  “I might as well want it—what choice do I have now?” Dora asked. It was not the first time she had been asked the question, and it always annoyed her. The baby would come in less than a month; it was considerably too late to mope about whether she wanted it.

  She had wanted all her babies—the two who had died, the three that she lost—and yet she was forty-one and had had nothing but grief and disappointment from her wanting. She did want the child inside her—twice she had dreamed that it was a girl—and yet she felt confused and wearied by the vexing circumstances she found herself in. Ogden was as kind as ever, but he was childlike himself; she felt she would soon have two children, one of whom she would be married to. She didn’t regret Ogden; he was too sweet and too helpful to be merely regretted, but she slightly regretted her own impetuosity. She now felt she might have been content with a looser arrangement, but of course it was too late for that, too.

  To complicate matters further, she had had the surprise offer of a commercial opportunity in Deadwood. A banker came to visit with an attractive proposition. The local hotel had failed, due to mismanagement, it was felt. The owner had disgraced himself over a Chinese woman and had acquired the opium habit to boot. The bank was owed money. Dora’s probity and her skill in running tidy establishments were well known in the region. The banker, a Mr. Fortescue, whom Dora had once flirted with briefly in Abilene many years before, came calling one day and asked her if she’d like to take over the Deadwood Hotel and help the bank recover its investment.

  Mr. Fortescue was slightly dashed to find Dora both married and pregnant. He had entertained a few fancies of a romantic nature on the ride over from Deadwood; one glimpse of her, eight months pregnant, drove them out of his mind, for the time, at least; also, the sight of her large young husband reminded him that he had, after all, come in pursuit of profit for his bank. As for the rest, once she had the child and recovered her figure, time would have to answer for that.

  Dora knew at once that she wanted to buy the hotel. The mines in Deadwood and Lead were by no means exhausted; the town received a constant stream of speculators, most of them with money to spend—she had no doubt that she could make the enterprise a solid success. Belle Fourche, on the other hand, was not flourishing, and probably never would.

  Also, her oldest dream had been to run a proper hotel—maybe even an elegant hotel. She knew she could do it and turn a profit. Of course there would be dining and drinking and cardplaying—but it was a fine hotel she wanted to run, not a fancy whorehouse. The times were changing; the western towns were filling up with churches, getting respectable. There would always be some frolicking done in a mining town like Deadwood—Dora had enjoyed the frolicking times and had no wish to reform the world and render it dull and churchly—but the era of the buffalo girls, as she and Martha had known it, was clearly coming to an end. A fine hotel that showed a nice profit would be the very thing; it would also provide an ideal environment in which to bring up a child.

  Before a slightly saddened Mr. Fortescue, his romantic hopes in shreds, left for Deadwood, Dora had signed a paper making her the owner of the hotel. She had put down eight hundred dollars cash, which Mr. Fortescue entrusted to a bank in Belle Fourche. Bandits crawled like ticks along the road to Deadwood, and he could not take the chance of losing money on his way home.

  When the proposition first came up, Dora had intended to argue for a reasonable delay—two months perhaps—before she took possession. In that length of time she felt sure she could have the baby and recover sufficiently to set about running her hotel.

  The minute she signed the paper and handed Mr. Fortescue his money, that intention fell by the wayside. A tremendous impatience seized her, an impatience even more insistent than the atta
ck which had caused her to marry Ogden two weeks after he carried her out of the mud. She woke up the next morning ready to cry, as usual, only to realize that she didn’t feel like crying. She now owned the Miner’s Rest, a hotel in Deadwood, Dakota Territory. Besides having a hotel, she was married and about to become a mother. Hopes she had harbored since she walked into Abilene many years before, a starved girl wearing her dead father’s shoes, had finally been realized. So why was she moping around Belle Fourche? She had almost a month before the child was due. The thing to do was move and get the Miner’s Rest spruced up and working as a fine hotel should work. Why waste a month? Spring was coming, the trails would thaw; mud that could swallow a wagon, its team, and its driver, too, would soon lie between herself and her exciting new property. The thing to do was go now.

  Keen to move, Dora flew downstairs and astonished everyone by announcing that they were moving forthwith. She sent Ogden off to lease two extra wagons. Bartle had been about to depart for St. Louis, but Dora collared him and got him to agree to drive one of the teams. Calamity would drive another, and Ogden the third. Doosie began to try to talk her out of such a hasty departure, pointing out that the baby could come at any time. Though an accomplished midwife, Doosie didn’t look forward to having to deliver Doosie’s baby in a wagon, particularly if the wagon were stuck in the mud somewhere between Belle Fourche and Deadwood.

  But Dora didn’t stay to hear Doosie’s cautions—she was out the door and across the street, where she promptly sold her present house to the shrewd old man who owned the hardware store.

  By the end of the day the three wagons had been rented: Ogden, Bartle, Calamity, Doosie, and Potato Creek Johnny were carrying things out of the house and stuffing them hastily in the wagons. They did their best to follow Dora’s rapid instructions, but none had been prepared to be converted so rapidly into a moving crew; many mistakes were made, things were put in the wrong boxes or the wrong wagon or else not put in at all, just left to sit where they dropped. Dora was sharp in her corrections; Calamity, a little unnerved by the suddenness of the move, was caught drinking several times and scolded for it. By the day’s end everyone’s nerves felt as if they had been raked by a blacksmith’s hasp, Dora being the blacksmith. She herself felt fine. She lay awake beside a worn-out Ogden most of the night, restless with excitement. The beds were the only things not packed—the beds and a few pans Doosie needed for cooking breakfast.