The Return of Little Big Man

  Now White Bear Woman’s several kids had begun to collect for the meal, but though they had been with the Wild West for a time, the littlest having in fact been born during the first season when Sitting Bull was with us, they had been brung up to be polite and not pester white visitors unless of course the latter wanted to buy the pictures of themselves and their offspring which the Indians sold.

  Which didn’t mean they wasn’t staring at Amanda.

  Now let me give her credit for not acting like many white women who visited the Sioux encampment: she never exclaimed about how cunning the little girl looked in the fringed dress and beaded headband or spoke to them in “Indian”—me give heap wampum, and so on—or worst of all, talked like they wasn’t there, for by now all the Sioux could understand some English words, especially when applied to themselves.

  On the other hand, Amanda was stuck with the idea she brung with her that these people was being misused, so the presence of them kids made her feel worse.

  “I see that we’ve come at an inopportune time,” she says.

  “It wouldn’t be if we sat down and fed with them.”

  Amanda frowned. “Let me explain. It’s not that I think I’m too good to eat with them, nor is it I have a distaste for their diet. I’ll take your word they have food they enjoy eating and in sufficient quantity. But if I joined them, I would be certifying that I believe their being here is right.”

  “You put more meaning in a pot of stew than it warrants,” I says. “Indians deal a lot with the spirit when the situation calls for it, but I never knowed them to be anything but direct when it comes to food. They eat whatever is available, for you got to eat to live, and you got to live to die. That last might sound idiotic on the face of it, until you realize that for them life is a circle.”

  “That may well be,” Amanda says, “but you are speaking of the past. The Indian’s situation was changed altogether by the coming of the white man. Whether or not that was deplorable, it took place and we must deal with it as a fact. Putting the red man on display as a performer is not the solution to his plight. Instead, it maintains him as a hopeless anachronism, by celebrating the savagery he must put behind him else he has no future whatsoever.”

  You couldn’t doubt her sincerity. After all, Amanda had been at this work of saving the red man for years, a cause that had little interest for most whites and none at all for many. It’s just that if you knowed Indians at all and how personal they was, by which I mean they was actually human, talking of them only as a problem, even when you was watching them get ready to do the most essential thing anybody living can do, namely eat, seemed to miss the beginning point.

  Right now we had to move upwind of the skilletful of hot lard, in which the raw dough was sizzling away under a cloud of steam and spitting grease drops at us.

  White Bear Woman looks up from her squat and says, “You ought to get a healthier woman to sleep with. You could cut yourself on Yellow Hair’s sharp bones.”

  “You have too keen a tongue. Two Eagles should give you a good beating.”

  I got to explain that me and her was kidding one another, and I had mentioned her husband, to which she said he’d get hurt bad if he tried it. Sioux women wasn’t easily mistreated.

  Amanda didn’t get any of this, of course, and might not of understood even if she had spoke Lakota. I reckon it was a coincidence that she now asked about the head of the family.

  “I reckon he’s inside the tepee or playing cards someplace and will show up when the food’s all ready to swallow,” I says. “The cooking is not his business.”

  Amanda looked around at the rest of the camp. There was females in front of the other lodges, doing the same as White Bear Woman, and kids as well, and where the meal was ready, the whole family including the menfolk was sitting on blankets, eating.

  “It’s real homey when you get onto it,” I told Amanda. “This is pretty close to a real village. It’s more comfortable than it might look. If the weather was wet, they’d all move indoors and make the fire there. The smoke goes up and out the top, where the lodgepoles cross.”

  “It is all very quaint,” Amanda said, “but is this how people should live in the United States of America at the end of the nineteenth century?”

  “They’re Indians, for heaven sakes. They always lived like this and don’t see nothing wrong with it.”

  “But they can’t continue to do so,” says she, her chin firm and her eyes fixed, “except in a show like this. It’s all make-believe. Their old way of life is dead and gone.”

  She was right, no doubt about it, when it come to the long run, but I had learned by that time in my own existence to take what advantages was offered by the short run while waiting for the long to come about, else you might end up without nothing, and if anybody was skilled at making the most of what lay at hand, it was an Indian, just as it was whites who specialized in the future. I seen myself as a mix of the two, though better accommodated to the redskin way of making the best of what was available, for there was no getting away from the fact that it was less complicated.

  “Amanda,” I says, “if we hang around much longer we’re gonna have to eat.”

  “There was no point in my coming here,” said she. “Colonel Cody simply wanted to evade a discussion of the issue. That these people might stoically accept their lot or even think it’s better than some is beside the point.”

  I expressed my regrets to White Bear Woman, who had just flipped the fried dough over on the other side, with less spattering this time, for it had soaked up most of the grease, which is what made it so tasty. The smells of that and the stew, as well as the roast meat being cooked over the fire in front of a neighboring tepee, had set my mouth to watering.

  “Speaking of eating,” I told Amanda, “I want to do it someplace. We don’t have a performance tonight. Would you want to eat supper with me?”

  Now this might not seem so earthshaking an event, until you understand I had never before in my whole life asked a woman out in the city sense of that term, I mean, I had ate many a meal, under various conditions, with various females, including of course my white and Indian wives, but never asked any on a “date,” as such, and I was a man of forty-seven years!

  I reckon I was fortunate she never took me up on it, for though I had hung around with the likes of the Prince of Wales, I had never doubted my position was as an entertainer and it didn’t matter if my manners was bad, but I sure wouldn’t of wanted to give Amanda any more reason than she already had to look down on me by not knowing how to feed in a fine New York eatery.

  Now till this moment Amanda had been so distant that I still doubted she remembered me, or anyway I preferred that doubt to thinking it didn’t mean much to her whether she did or not, but all of a sudden now she saw me as a person.

  She even produced one of her rare smiles. “I’m sorry, Jack. I’ve been preoccupied. Yes, let’s eat together, but not at one of those over-priced restaurants.” I had an impulse to tell her price was no object, in case she thought I couldn’t afford it, but was checked by the suspicion that her real reason might of had to do with my manners or appearance. She went on, “And they are much too noisy for conversation. Why don’t you come home with me to my flat? I’ll make a meal, if you don’t mind something simple.”

  “Why, Amanda,” I says, trying to be easygoing about it, “that’s real neighborly of you.” But I was in a state of great feeling. I won’t say excitement as such in case you might believe I mean indecent, which wasn’t it at all. If I never before asked a lady out to eat, neither had one ever invited me to her house: that the first such turned out to be Amanda was the kind of thing I never could of imagined.

  By the standards of a later day it took a long time to go anywhere at that time, but relative to that era, moving around New York was swift. We steamed across to Manhattan on the ferry and then took the elevated railroad uptown. I didn’t marvel that a girl from Kansas knowed her way around the city, for Amanda always
had a natural authority when it come to civilized matters, but she told me it had took her a while to get on to the best way of handling herself in New York, where it was more than a simple thing of avoiding the areas and persons who seemed un-respectable as in Dodge, for there was too many of both here and ninety-nine percent of the people you encountered was strangers and didn’t care what nobody thought of them.

  The style that seemed to work best was to act at all times like you knew what you was doing and nobody else did. She says that both parts of that was necessary for it to be successful: neglect one, and you left a gap for somebody to ride through and trample you down—the language is mine, but that was her theory, and I expected she was right but thought it too bad a young woman of such refinement had had to become so cynical here in the East.

  It seemed to me her flat wasn’t too far from Mrs. Custer’s, though I never was sure where I was in any city, even Manhattan, where north of the Wall Street area the streets was regular as a gridiron. I could find my way across untracked prairie or forest where I had never previously been, but I needed a guide when in New York or London or Chicago, where I was distracted by the presence of so many people, vehicles, and buildings higher than two stories, and when you got traffic, you had a lot of noise: cursing and the cracking of whips, and whether you was on that elevated railway or anywhere in its vicinity, you was made deaf to any other sound. How any human person could stand to live permanently in such a place was beyond me.

  I thought the outside of her building was ugly, being covered by a scaffolding of iron fire escapes, but Amanda’s flat was real nice, with bright gaslight and pictures on the walls of the parlor and thick-holstered furniture in green plush.

  “This is real comfortable,” I says, instead of complimenting her on the furnishings, which I thought was nicer even than Mrs. Custer’s but I was afraid she might think worse of me if I said something dumb about them.

  I was wise not to go further, for she says with disdain, “It is certainly ugly.” It turned out she had rented it in the furnished condition. I guess she didn’t spend much time there, at least not in the sitting room. The surprise to me, though, was she proved to be a good cook, producing as fine a plate of scrambled eggs and ham as I had tasted, and I mean no faint praise in saying as much, for that was a dish I ate a lot at cafes all over the country, and too often it was like a leather glove, but Amanda’s was fluffy as a cloud.

  We ate in the kitchen, which was my idea as being more homey, but Amanda with a skillet and wearing a plain apron over her finery was still not in the least domestic—unlike Annie Oakley who was, wherever her and Frank hung their hats, but was also a lousy cook, so though she done a lot of needlework at home, they ate most of their meals out.

  Amanda’s coffee weren’t bad either, though I would of preferred it boiled a little longer on account of that was the way I had drank it all my life, cooked down real bitter and then dosed with as much sugar as it would soak up, and I’d spoon out whatever residue was too thick to drip onto my tongue, holding the cup over my mouth. Which I mention, though I never done it in public even in some of the dumps I ate in out West, because it was all I could do to keep from doing it here, so warm did I feel being with Amanda, and while I was aware she was friendlier than I had ever known her, she was a cool customer, I reckon by nature rather than upbringing, for her Ma if you recall was a woman who believed she might even at that late date have a career in singing in a music hall in Dodge City. Her Pa had been a banker who she accused of frequenting the Lone Star harlots. I guess in Dodge he was well-to-do but in New York, where Bill Cody had friends like J. G. Bennett who owned the Herald newspaper and sent Stanley to find Livingstone, and Leonard W. Jerome who lived on Madison Square and was grandpa to an energetic, talkative English boy who come to see the Wild West when we was in London, name of Winston Churchill, why Mr. Teasdale wouldn’t of been of so high a place as to warrant the putting on of airs by his daughter. I had to conclude she was just born that way, with a sense of her moral superiority, in which she was by no means alone, for Wyatt Earp was like that, except with him it was for selfish ends, whereas so far as I could see, Amanda had little interest in personal gain or possessions. Later I found out that satin dress didn’t come from any of the fashionable places along the Ladies’ Mile but rather from a cut-rate drygoods shop downtown: it just looked like a million dollars on her.

  Since leaving our encampment she hadn’t talked any more about the Indians and had not volunteered any personal details, nor asked after mine, but just offered observations on New York, of which she was a harsh critic for somebody who wasn’t compelled to live there.

  But when I pointed that out, with all respect, she says, “This is where the money is.” Meaning, not in the sense of making a living, which was why Mrs. Custer came there, but rather in getting people to contribute to the Friends of the Red Man, which like Annie with her initials for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, Amanda generally shortened to F.R.M. “But we have ferocious competition from every other organization of social betterment.”

  “I can’t rightly speak for him,” I says, “but if I know Cody, he will give you a nice contribution. Despite what you think, he ain’t against Indians.”

  “How could that be accepted in good conscience?” Amanda asked. “Would it not be like accepting in the fight against Negro slavery funds that had been made by selling cotton picked by slaves?”

  She had a real fine mind, no question about it, to come up with such a twist. “I guess you could look at it that way, but you could also see it as turning to the good some of the money which in your opinion is at present going only to a bad cause.”

  “Let me clarify the point, Jack. We don’t begrudge the Indians the wages paid by Colonel Cody, or for that matter his earning a personal profit from a business enterprise. The issue here is not about money as such. What is so objectionable about the Wild West show is its presentation of Indians as savage and primitive. Paying them to be so actually makes it worse. Without pay they would not degrade themselves. They would settle down on their acreage and join American society, and educate their children in proper public schools. The Indian will never be civilized until the importance of the tribe is diminished.” She opens her eyes wide. “I know that might sound heartless, but what alternative is there?”

  Here was a reverse of the usual, with the woman representing reason and the man, namely me, being the person dominated by feeling, but much as I admired Amanda for strength of character and even suspected deep down she was probably right from the historical point of view, I knowed the tribe was the best thing the fighting Indians had going for them, and if you was ever part of one, like I was during my formative years, and then went on to another way of life, with nobody to rely on but yourself, you tended to be lonely, and I had been white all the time.

  But the fact was Amanda and her bunch really was trying to do some good for people who needed a hand, whereas for all my regard for Indians they was benefiting me more than I was them, which happened to have been true since I first hooked up with any, aside from maybe paying for the defense of them Cheyenne charged with murder back in Kansas.

  Now you might be able to see from this little account of my meeting with Amanda again what never occurred to me at the time, and that is that my thinking on this subject now, which I previously avoided doing because of its hopelessness, had more to do with my personal infatuation than with sympathy for the red man considered as a cause.

  “I don’t want to pry into your private life,” I says while she was pouring me more coffee. “But I was wondering what you done after the Major’s school closed.”

  “I went back to Dodge City,” she said in her crispest voice, “where my father’s bank failed because he had embezzled money from it, but before he could be tried he shot himself to death, and my mother died the following year, probably from shame. One of my sisters married a cattle broker and moved to Topeka. The younger one followed a man to San Francisco and has not been hear
d from since, which means reality fell short of her expectations, otherwise I would have heard from her. I think it’s more likely she’s walking the streets.”

  I was sorry I asked, unhappily reminding her of these matters. There was deep feeling behind the slightly resentful yet cool manner Amanda had always displayed since I first met her. She just had the self-control not to advertise it to others. Sometimes she could get too harsh, but maybe that was protection against being weakened by sadness.

  It was not good manners to ask a spinster if she ever come close to being married, so I did not do so, though I would of liked to know about that more than anything else. “I’m sure sorry to hear of all the troubles you been through,” I says. “I admit I used to think of you as a rich girl.”

  Amanda’s reactions never could be predicted, at least not by me. “Yes,” she said, “I suppose so, relative to the place and time. But all of a sudden I had no source of income but what I could find on my own, and I refused to get married to acquire financial security. I might have taught school, but no local positions were open, and any employment associated with the church was out of the question after my father’s scandal.”

  I just wished I had knowed about her difficulties, as I could of helped her out, but on what basis? It sure could not look like she was a kept woman. In case you ain’t reached that conclusion on your own, I might say Amanda was a real difficult person to know how to deal with, especially if you was uneducated and her social inferior.

  “Necessity forced me to review the lady’s education to which I had been subjected. I assumed it would be a vain effort to find anything of practical potential, but wonder of wonders”—her eyes sparkled—“I actually found something! I had received years of piano lessons. Of course, that meant Scarlatti and Chopin, but I wasn’t talented enough to give public performances of such music. However, I was sufficiently gifted to play in a saloon.”

  “You didn’t,” I says.