Calamity Jane: I had heard the name around but never run into the specimen before. She had a face like a potato and was built sort of dumpy, and when she seen that Caroline was down for good, she prodded her with a boot, spat onto the street, and picking up the sombrero what had fell off in the fight and clapping it back upon her man’s haircut, she swaggered into the saloon.
You remember that time Caroline rescued me from drink by dunking me in a horse trough? Well, she was too big for me to return the favor, so I just filled the crown of my hat with water from the same and flang it into her face. Upon which she woke up, snarling: “Where’s that whore? I’ll kill her!”
I set back upon my heels. I said: “You been whipped, Caroline, and I believe you richly deserved it if you was pretending to be Calamity Jane. What did you want to do that for?”
Well, it took a minute or two for her to gather herself and realize who I was, but she was still too upset to express much affection for her brother, so I helped her up and she was all right though bruised and with a purplish eye and a cut lip and a bald patch where some of her hair had been tore out at the roots and the lobe of her one ear had been bit almost clear through. But I found a Doc and he dosed some liniment on her and it looked like she would live, so we went to a restaurant and she eat a steak as big as my back and about five pound of potatoes fried in grease.
“Now,” says I as she was subsequently picking her back teeth—most of the front ones was missing—“now,” I says, “you want to talk about it?”
“Well,” says Caroline, “if you was any kind of brother, you’d go and shoot that bitch.”
“Maybe I will,” I says, “if I could know what she done to you other than whip you in a fair fight though smaller and with a shorter reach.”
“I ain’t in condition a-tall, Jack,” Caroline says, pouring some coffee down her hatch. “I’m feeling real poorly, and ’spect to die.”
Now you can’t take a person serious on that subject when you just seen her devour an enormous hunk of steer.
But Caroline went on: “I don’t mean sick of body, but of soul.”
She takes another drink of coffee and wipes her mouth on her shirt sleeve. “I reckon a person of your cold temperament would find it hard to understand how another might die of love, Jack, but I’ll thank you not to sneer at it.”
Instead of replying to that, I says: “Caroline, what ever became of your intended, Frank Delight? I recall you was supposed to get hitched to him back in ’67.”
“Well I never,” says she, “if I correctly remember the man after all these years. You mean that honky-tonker who followed the U.P.? He turned out real bad, Jack. I believe that was when you run off and left your defenseless sister all alone, and this Frank, if that was his name, soon as you was gone, he made lewd and unseemly advances towards me and I had to cold-cock him myself, seeing I never had no brother to protect me. Where’d you go?” she asks, and then adds: “Major North told me you showed the yellow streak at that fight with the Indians and turned tail and run away.”
Caroline was one of them people who utter three failures of judgment for every two words they speak, and by trying to correct them, you only succeed in presenting further occasion on which to exercise their vice, so I kept my remarks to the minimum.
“So after that,” says she, “I couldn’t very well stay around the U.P., so I went to Californy and Oregon and Arizona and Santy Fee and Texas, I been to Texas a couple times, and Virginia City, and Ioway. I been many places, Jack, and done more than a few things, but I have kept out of the gutter.”
“But,” I says, “what is this stuff about Calamity Jane? I understand you was pretending to be her.”
Caroline gets a sheepish look and wipes her mouth again, all the way to the nose, upon the cuff of her man’s checked shirt.
“Because,” I goes on, “if that other was the real Calam, she’s sure ugly and fairly foul-mouthed, and I don’t believe there is many men who find such a person attractive. As for fighting, I wouldn’t think women was supposed to be good at it.”
Caroline was kind of sneery at my innocence. “You’d be surprised,” she says, “at how many fellows find a fighting gal mighty to their taste. I have had a good many admirers every place I have went, including, if you’d like to know, Mr. Wild Bill Hickok, of who I reckon you have heerd, only that whore you mention tried to steal him away from me. Now I’ll tell you, what people recall about her is that name, it ain’t her personal self, and ‘Calamity’ ain’t her real name nohow, which is Jane Canary, but just let a bunch in some saloon hear ‘Calam,’ and they don’t care who it is, they’ll joke you and buy you drinks and you are real popular. I’ve had some hard luck in my time, Jack, and I don’t mind being the center of a bunch of fun-loving fellows.”
There was something real pathetic about Caroline. But I knowed what she meant about names: it was certainly true. Take me, and look at the colorful, dangerous life I have led in participating in some of the most remarkable events of the history of this country. I’ll wager to say you never heard of me before now. Then think of Wild Bill Hickok, George Armstrong Custer, Wyatt Earp—names is what they had. Wild Jack Crabb, Crabb’s Last Stand—it just don’t sound the same.
But of course right at that moment I wasn’t thinking of that, but rather about my erstwhile acquaintance Hickok, a remarkable coincidence.
“Wild Bill?” says I. “He is here in Cheyenne?” For I had not seen him since K.C. though having heard much of his renown in the years intervening.
But while she showed no particular sign on her own mention of the name, as soon as I said it Caroline commenced to sniffle and sob and abuse that man and I couldn’t get no more out of her that was coherent on the subject, and did not understand the situation until the next day as I was walking down the main street of Cheyenne, who should step out of a drygoods store but Hickok himself.
He had put on a few pounds since I seen him last and was getting jowly; still wore his hair long, and was attired in his fancy town clothes of frock coat and all. He carried several boxes, of course under his left arm, and his eyes, which had seemed to get smaller owing to the fatness of his face, flickered up one side of the street and down the next.
I says, slow and easy: “Hiya, Bill. Remember me?”
He give me an equally slow once-over. I reckon he knowed me well enough right off, but had to check first as to whether I was about to pull a hideout weapon on him.
Then he says: “How are you, hoss? Still playing poker?”
I says not as much as in the old days, for I was fixing to go for gold.
So was he, he says, and instantly suggested that maybe we could go together. So we went to a saloon to drink on it, and that was when he says: “But first I am getting married.”
Now, I realized that it was not to Caroline, and that was her trouble.
“To Calamity Jane?” I asks.
Hickok looked at me real funny. “Some people say,” he allowed, “that Jane and I are already man and wife and had a baby daughter. But not,” he added, “to my face.”
I note this part of the conversation for what it is worth in historical interest.
“No,” says he. “I am getting married to Mrs. Agnes Lake Thatcher, who is the widow of the celebrated showman William Lake Thatcher, now deceased. Agnes was formerly an equestrienne with the circus, riding standing up on the bare back of a white horse, prettiest thing you ever saw. A remarkable woman, hoss. I saw her perform some years ago in the state of New York, when I was traveling with my own show.”
Now that was a phase of Hickok’s career of which I had not heard.
“Oh yes,” he says. “It was at Niagara Falls. I had a herd of buffalo, a cinnamon bear, and a band of Comanches. But the animals got loose and charged the audience, and the Indians had a real hunt on their hands before things settled down. It was a mess and I had to sell the buffalo to get fare back home.”
“Speaking of Indians,” I says, “I understand the Sioux don’t
like miners going into the Black Hills.”
Bill disposed of that with a wave of his left hand. “Don’t worry about it,” he says. “The Army’s going out to round them up.”
“The miners?” I asks.
He looks impatient. “No, the Indians. You can’t stop white men from going where they will. I happen to have heard,” he said in a low voice, “that Grant sent out a secret order to the Army not to stop any more miners from entering the Hills. Instead, they are mounting a campaign against the hostiles in the Powder River country.”
Mention of the Powder River give me an unpleasant feeling, which I don’t believe I must explain if you have listened to my many references to that favorite area of Old Lodge Skins’s.
“Led by George Armstrong Custer, no doubt,” I says.
Hickok replies: “You are out of touch, hoss. Don’t you know about the Congressional hearings?”
Well, I did not, being only a now-and-again reader of the newspapers, and considering politics to be a marvelous bore. It was only by accident that in later years I saw that notice about Amelia’s husband.
For that matter, when I was acquainted with Wild Bill in Kansas City, neither did he take any interest in public affairs; so this new attitude of his must have been connected with getting married. You recall when me and Olga was hitched was the same period in which I participated in the public life of Denver.
Anyway, Bill told me there was a stink about the Army post traders in which Orvil Grant, the President’s brother, was involved. Nobody else but authorized traders could sell anything on a military reservation, so naturally these fellows put no limit on their prices and was gouging the troops. They was also getting ahold of supplies that was supposed to go to the reservation Indians under treaty obligations and selling them to soldiers and civilians. Orvil Grant was believed to be illegally selling traderships to the highest bidder, using his brother’s pull. Belknap, the Secretary of War, was in back of all this, etc., etc.
“Oh, is that all?” says I when Bill had apprised me, for to tell you the truth I thought all this was perfectly normal, having never known a case among white men where the fellows with authority and connections did not make the most of it. I think a good case could be made for the modesty of Orvil Grant’s operations, considering whose kin he was.
“Well,” Bill says, slightly irritated, “you asked about Custer. That’s why he isn’t going out after the Sioux: he went to Washington to testify in the hearings.”
Now to show you how limited my idea of Custer was, I says: “Wants to get himself in good with the President.”
Hickok shook his head. “You stick to poker, hoss,” he says. “Politics is too much for you. Custer’s going to testify against Belknap and Orvil. Grant will probably run him out of the Army for it.”
“What’s Custer want to do that for?”
And Wild Bill says: “Because he always does what he thinks is right. There are a lot of people who hate his guts, but there isn’t anybody who can say that he doesn’t back up what he believes in.”
Then Hickok returned to the subject of getting married. “Agnes,” he says, “is a fine lady, and not to be confused with the kind of women you and me knew in K.C. That’s the reason why I have decided to go for gold and become rich. I hear you can pick it off the ground, practically.” He ordered another round of drinks and we got to talking over what gear we’d need and whether we should take in other partners, for we was sure enough going as soon as he got hitched and come back from his honeymoon which he and the Mrs. was going to take back East in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Wild Bill had sure changed. In K.C. I could swear he never knowed the name of the President, let alone the ins and outs of politics he now spouted. Nor do I think he really cared about money in the old days. Obviously it was this woman of his that had made him more of a normal human being. I noticed he was learning to use his right hand occasionally to drink with, and he wasn’t nearly so nervous about the other customers of the saloon; nor did he jump when I went into my vest pocket for a dollar.
I don’t mean he was turning to butter. As a matter of fact, a day or so later he killed a man who drew on him in front of a livery stable. But there wasn’t no question of his being under less pressure, or maybe in view of what he was going to do before the summer was out, just another kind.
I certainly didn’t bother the man none about my sister Caroline, so I don’t know to this day whether her romance with him was purely imaginary or had a basis, for I’ll tell you something about that gal: she was losing her mind, poor thing. I should have seen it coming years back. Now that I thought of it, I remembered that everything I had ever heard about her unhappy love affairs come from her alone. It was right likely that Frank Delight, for example, never had asked her to marry him.
The point was that while Caroline survived them romantic disasters in her earlier years, she wasn’t getting any younger. Indeed, she was forty-four if she was a day, and hadn’t so far as I knowed ever got married yet, which she had been trying to do as far back as ’52 when the drunken Cheyenne massacred our menfolk.
But you couldn’t have told it from her appearance. She had looked much the same for twenty years except, as I mentioned, her front teeth was knocked out and her ear was some chawed up, etc. But I couldn’t see a gray hair on her head; and her features, which had always been strenuous, didn’t need to get more so as she went through life, as they usually do with the rest of us.
However, her mind had definitely sprung some bad leaks. For example, when I come back from that meeting with Hickok to the hotel where me and her had rooms, I decided to confront her with the truth, like slapping a hysterical person in the face to bring him out of it.
“Wild Bill is getting married,” I says.
Caroline was setting on her bed, with her leg cocked up, a-scraping at the sole of her boot.
“And not to Calamity Jane,” I goes on.
She lifted her head and folded up the jackknife and says, real smug: “I know. It is me that he is marrying.”
Right then is when I realized she should be put in the booby hatch, though I didn’t go right out and look for one then. But I should have, for once she fixed upon the theme of the wedding she kept it up day after day, and I guess was pathetic enough, for I had to lock her up in her room so as not to be embarrassed by a crazy sister in front of the other people I had got acquainted with in Cheyenne, and she would drape the window curtains about her like a bridal veil and parade around, etc., though never trying to bust out of the door or window, which in itself showed how far gone she was, for Caroline had never been able to stay in one place for long.
They didn’t yet have a nuthouse in Cheyenne, and while there was surely one down in Denver, I hadn’t been to that city since leaving it with Olga and Gus in ’64 and would have felt funny returning there now with a loony sister in tow, so I took Caroline on the Union Pacific, which we had helped to build, east to Omaha.
She didn’t give me no trouble, on account of I convinced her the wedding ceremony was going to be held there, for Wild Bill liked to do things up right and wanted to get married in a big town. Omaha was real big by then and had a gloomy home for the mentally defective, run by people who you would have took for the patients had they not been wearing uniforms. So it wasn’t no pleasure to hand Caroline over to them, I’ll tell you, but it had to be done, and I don’t believe my sister was unhappy with the arrangement, for she immediately took that home for her own house and them attendants for her servants and become so involved with her wedding plans that she never even said goodbye to me.
That is how I happened to miss Wild Bill’s real wedding, which took place in Cheyenne while I was gone, and I never did see his wife.
I never went prospecting with Wild Bill, either. In fact, I never laid eyes on him again. He come back from his honeymoon alone, leaving Agnes in Cincinnati, and went on up to Deadwood in the Black Hills where they was scratching for gold in that celebrated gulch, only he didn’t do no min
ing. He played poker. On the afternoon of August 2, 1876, he took a seat with his back to the door, and in come a man named Jack McCall and shot him dead. Nobody knows why he left his spine unguarded that day, for the first and last time, unless it was that he had reached the point in life where he had to have confirmed what he always suspected.
Anyhow, what he was holding when he died has ever since been called the dead man’s hand: two pair, aces and eights. R.I.P., J. B. Hickok.
It was April when I deposited poor Caroline in the nuthatch, and seeing as how Omaha lays on the Missouri River, I decided to go by boat up into Dakota Territory, maybe as far as Pierre, and then overland to the Hills. The river was just opening up from the winter, and I got me passage on a sternwheeler and rode it as far as Yankton, where I changed to another boat by the name of Far West. I did that so I could be at Custer’s Last Stand.
I’m kidding. But you know how them things look later. The way it really happened was that the first boat had a little layover in Yankton, in the course of which I heard a lot of talk about the Far West and its captain, a man named Marsh who was famous along the Missouri. There used to be quite a body of legend about riverboating—captains who could navigate in a heavy dew, etc.—and Marsh was part of it, not having been hurt any by being a friend of an author named Mark Twain who wasn’t noted for understatement.
Now I didn’t have nothing for nor against Marsh, but what interested me was to learn that he was taking the Far West all the way up the Missouri and then down the Yellowstone, carrying supplies for the campaign against the hostiles who had, now it was spring, run off the reservations in considerable numbers and was thought to be in the Powder River region. Which of course was up in Montana and nowhere near the Black Hills. Actually, the Indians never did much at all to defend the Hills and I believe already counted them as lost by this time. They had in reality run away again, and the Army was going to hunt them down and whip them as at the Washita. You understand it was all wild country up on the Powder: there weren’t no settlers there, nor even gold miners. It was the native place of many of them Indians, but it was not the reservation they had been assigned.