Little Big Man (57 page)

Lincoln wasn’t much of a place, occupying a sweep of treeless flat bottomland overlooked by bluffs from which the hostiles had been spying on the camp; you could see them little piles of stones behind which they’d conceal their heads.

No sooner had the boat tied up at the dock than two women come on board, and one of them was the prettiest female I ever seen in my life with one exception. And well-dressed and gracious, and oh my, what a remarkable sight up there in that barren land with the constant wind blowing across the flats.

It was Mrs. Custer. I recognized her though never having laid eyes on her before, with her winsome round face and beautiful sad eyes and wearing a dinky little velvet bonnet sort of like a derby, and she put her tiny feet on the rough gangplank the deckhands threw down, and walked over it like a bird. Them fellows just stood gawking; it was me who put a hand out at the other end, and she rested hers lightly upon the wrist of it as she stepped to the deck and looked squarely at me and never said thanks, but rather smiled it with small nose and a soft line of pearly teeth. I’ll admit something: I would have killed every Indian on the plains if she had asked me to, or at least if she had been watching. Then she passed me by, for I wasn’t nobody, and was short as her and, as a matter of fact, fair seedy after the time on that boat, where the washing facilities wasn’t of the most improved.

Well sir, what did I do but follow along behind her like a personal servant or an idiot to which somebody done a kind thing, and there was that other woman, too, who was General Custer’s sister and the wife of Lieutenant James Calhoun, though I couldn’t have described her a second later.

Captain Marsh showed them into his cabin, and presumably getting after something on the heel of my boot, I lingered outside the door.

“Captain,” says this whippoorwill voice, “I beg of you to let us come along.”

“Forgive me, ma’am,” Marsh says, “I cannot.”

The same exchange, more or less, was repeated several times, but the captain stayed firm, and I moved away so as to hear no more of her distress. I was full of wonder at this wife of that glorious soldier, with his six hundred troops and his supply boat and Gatling guns. Bad worried she was, you could hear. Now women generally shiver at the thought of Indians, but not, you would think, one who was married to the victor of the Washita. Custer had whipped the Southern Cheyenne, and found gold in the Black Hills. He even survived the enmity of the President of the United States! He was hated by individuals, but was the public’s great favorite, and Mr. James Gordon Bennett of the
New York Herald
had sent along a correspondent to be “in at the kill”—of the Indians, that is. Custer’s wife was as pretty as a woman could get. So what ailed her?

I went onto shore. An old sergeant was there who had been left behind from the campaign on account of his retirement was coming up, watery-eyed old devil whose purple nose told me he had been doing much of his soldiering across the river in the saloons of Bismarck.

I says: “Why would the General’s Mrs. want to come along, a fine lady like that?”

“Had a nightmare,” says he, then honked into a bandanna and put it away. “Seen a big buck Sioux, bare to the G-string, holding up a bleeding scalp of long yellow locks. Might of been that was the reason why the General had a short haircut afore they left.”

I says: “No, he never! …”

“All right then,” says the sarge, “you just come upriver and you know better.”

“Settle down,” I says. “I ain’t calling you a liar, I’m only confounded. I sure never thought Custer would slice off them golden locks. Now what will the Indians call him if not Long Hair?”

“Son of the Morning Star,” says the old soldier. “That’s what the Crow scouts named him.”

“Was you at the Washita?”

“No,” the sergeant says, “I had to stay behind in camp with a case of the screaming shits.” He was clearly one of them fellows who find some way of missing all hazards.

At that moment Mrs. Custer and the other lady come off the boat, escorted by Captain Marsh, and got into a carriage on the dock and was drove off to the fort by an orderly. Marsh stood looking after it, and then he turns and says to me: “Poor thing, but I can’t take along any women, especially now with this trouble between Custer and Grant. You know, Custer got court-martialed some years ago down in Kansas for running off a campaign to see his wife.”

The old sergeant give a wheezing laugh and rubbed his stubbly chin: with the commander gone, I reckon he didn’t bother to shave regular. He says: “He generally does what he wants. In the Grand Review at the end of the War, he galloped past Grant without salutin’. Claimed his horse bolted, but I seen him give it the spur.”

Marsh, having himself some reputation for dash, didn’t want to hear about this. He says: “Well now, take if Custer gets hurt, why, it would be all the worse to have her there.”

“He has a charmed life,” I says bitterly.

Well, Marsh went about the business of taking on more stores, and the old sarge invited me to cross over to Bismarck with him and we’d tie one on at a good hog ranch he knowed, which is what they sometimes called a whiskey joint, and he’d even let me buy if I insisted, for he had already went through his pay. On the last subject, he told me the men on the campaign wasn’t to be paid until they got into the field, so that they couldn’t spree in Bismarck. Custer didn’t want to march out with a regiment who was all hung over. So the Seventh Cavalry was carrying two months’ wages in its pockets through the wilds of Montana, around $25,000 in paper bills.

I had to turn down the invite, for the
Far West
was soon moving north again, up to the big bend of the Missouri and on into the Yellowstone River, with no significant layovers except the regular stops to cut wood to fire its boilers and a dropping off of supplies
to an infantry column waiting at Glendive Creek. It was into the first week in June when we finally reached the mouth of the Powder, and that’s where we found the Seventh Cavalry in bivouac.

All right, I had got there. Now what? There was quite an assemblage of Army thereabout. Besides the Seventh there was infantry and Gatling guns, and a supply train of 150 wagons; a herd of cattle, most of which however by now had been butchered and ate on the march in; a mule train; and a couple hundred civilian teamsters, mule skinners, and herders. Not to mention some forty specimens of an Indian for who the proper name is I think Arikara though they was mainly called Ree at that time. These Ree had come along as scouts, being hereditary enemies of the Sioux, though I believe that in time past they had been friendly with the Cheyenne when the Human Beings lived along the Missouri, for that’s where the Ree still resided.

Right miserable-looking bunch, they was small and soot-colored, and I think a Ree would rather have cut his own throat than ever wash a particle of his person. Still, they was Indians, albeit enemies to them with which I was raised, and the mood I was in, I’d have took to anybody at the moment who was not white of countenance. I was thinking of Old Lodge Skins, see, and if he was still alive, and the Lakota tribes, the Minneconjou and the Hunkpapa and all, out there someplace to the west of us. Rumor now had it they was probably encamped along the Rosebud. I’ll tell you about that creek: it got its name from the wild rosebushes along its bank. I reckoned its waters would run with blood any day now, like at the Washita.

The
Far West
had started to unload its stores, and I spotted a Ree what had come up to where that sutler was setting up his barrels of whiskey. This Indian was a dumpy fellow, dressed in filthy buckskins, and I would have took him for a degenerate imbecile the way he was a-studying them barrels.

But some trooper says to me: “Looky there at Bloody Knife, will you. He’d cut his Ma’s throat for a shot of red-eye. You would never know he is Hard A—” He broke off, on account of he didn’t know who I might be, being as I wore civilian clothes: among the herders and teamsters was Boston Custer, the General’s youngest brother, and his nephew Armstrong Reed. The trooper had been going to say “Hard Ass,” but changed it. “You wouldn’t guess,
from looking at him, that he was the General’s favorite scout, would you?” He snorted. “Goddam old drunk.”

But Bloody Knife wasn’t drunk at that minute, nor for some time thereafter, for not even scout Indians was allowed openly to drink whiskey in front of white men. So he hung around hopelessly awhile and tried to talk to people in sign language, and at last, not able to stand and study them barrels without a chance to break into one, he trudged off as though from the burial of a loved one, so grief-stricken was his dark face.

I caught him up and, never speaking Ree, says in the signs: “You want a drink?”

He says: “All right.” So I got a canteenful of that red-eye dispensed by the sutler, and me and Bloody Knife went on out one of the many ravines that cut up the country at the mouth of the Powder and set behind a sagebush, after the Indian had emptied his bladder so as to have a full capacity for drinking the whiskey. This pissing also served to run out a rattlesnake who had been sunning himself in the area: rattlers was abundant in that region.

I give Bloody Knife time for a good swallow and then took back the canteen. I says, watching a couple drops run down his chin and neck and flush out some bugs what lived in his collar, “What is Long Hair going to do?”

The Ree just kept his black eyes upon that canteen. “He has cut his hair,” he says, making the slicing sign with his two dusky hands.

I signaled that I knowed that, but never saw what it had to do with the issue.

“It means,” he says, “that he is going to die.”

I give him the canteen again. I don’t have to tell you at this point what importance an Indian sets upon human hair. Scalps are taken for a more important purpose than just trophies: a man without a skull-cover is considered powerless even when he reaches the Other Side. And whenever Indians saw a white man balded by nature, they believed him a coward who had deliberately shaved his head. I realized Custer had made a bad mistake for his own interests.

“That was not a good thing to do,” says Bloody Knife, who was getting more depressed with every swallow. He looks up at the sun and signals to it: “I shall not see you rise many more times.”

I knew that if I let him continue on that note he would commence to sing his death song at any minute and then I’d never get
anything else out of him, so I says right quick: “But that will not happen until all those barrels of whiskey are gone, so drink up.”

At which he was some cheered and filled his fly-trap again.

“Many Sioux and Cheyenne out there?”

He says: “Numerous as stars on a clear night.”

I pointed back towards the camp. “But look at all those soldiers. And more will come from the west and south.”

Bloody Knife shook his dirty head of tangled hair. It was graying some at the temples. “It does not matter,” he says. “We will all be rubbed out. Long Hair will never be the Great Father in the chief village of the white men, as he wishes. I like him a lot, but his medicine has turned bad.”

He goes on that Custer had come to him and the other Ree a night or so since, give them presents, and said he would whip the entire Sioux nation before the month was out, in return for which the American people would make him President.

Well, Grant was in trouble on account of them crooks in his Administration, and when you figured he had got to the White House by whipping the Rebs, a similar result might transpire for the man who sent the Indians under, for they was the only outstanding enemy of the U.S.A. at this particular time in the hundredth year of our Independence from the tyranny of the Old Country.

“I reckon he would like to get it all done by the Fourth of July,” is what I wanted to say, but that is a hell of a difficult speech to make by signs. The Cheyenne know July as “the Moon When Buffalo Are Mating,” but I didn’t know what the Ree called it. However, I made the buffalo-horns, and the motion for screwing—which is the same as used by every white schoolboy—and for moon, and for the fourth day thereof. Still, what would a Ree know of the historical meaning. So I says the day when the soldiers made a lot of noise, shooting cannon and the like.

A look of dim recognition come over his dark face. “And get drunk?” he asks.

“Oh, hell,” I says aloud in English. “What does it matter? Drink up, you poor son of a bitch.”

He shortly passed out, and I took the precaution of unloading his rifle, in case he woke up before the effects had worn off.

I had learned what I wanted to know. I reckoned, in view of Custer’s current needs, this upcoming battle would make the Washita look cheap. Bloody Knife’s pessimism did not impress me. I didn’t
care how many hostiles had collected, I knowed they wasn’t organized, never had much modern armament, and was living with their wives and kids.

Well, what was I going to do about it? That old childish idea of assassinating Custer was obviously out. Such a stunt, pulled off now, would just make the Seventh fight harder. They all hated his guts—no sooner had I got off the
Far West
than I heard the troopers grousing about him: they was particularly burned up that he hadn’t let them be paid till they got into the field, which meant that even if they never found a hostile Indian, there’d be men in an outfit that size who would die of rattlesnake bite and the like, without having had a little celebration in town before they went on their last campaign. But once he had been shot by me, or stabbed in the back, he would turn into a hero. Anyway, General Terry was in actual command, so the campaign would not stop.

Now I had left Bloody Knife under the sagebush when, walking back to camp a-studying this matter, who should I spot but a figure out of the distant past, sitting on the bank just beyond where the Powder emptied into the Yellowstone.

His skin was darker yet than a Ree’s and he wore a flop hat with an eagle feather in it. By God if he had changed much in twenty year.

I says to him: “Well, Lavender, this is some surprise.”