CHAPTER 16 My Indian Wife
“HOLD ON, BROTHER,” I cried in Cheyenne. “Let us talk.” And then, with my attention so strenuously fixed upon him, I tripped on that steep slope I was negotiating and plunged directly towards him, my pistol firing inadvertently as my hands clenched.
He held up his knife, with his left fingers gripping the right-hand wrist, so as to give added support for the impact. Which is to say, I was about to be impaled just below the arch of my rib-cage. My accidental shot had gone into the air.
Well, I was only falling six feet, but the time consumed by any type of action is relative, and I recall hanging motionless there in space like the subject in a photograph or artist’s rendering. Shadow wore two eagle feathers, aslant one from the other. There was beads of sweat upon his brown shoulders. He wore a choker of horizontal porcupine quills divided by vertical lines of blue beads; and between his left bicep and elbow cavity, a copper armlet; between his legs a dirty breechclout of red flannel. The black points of his narrow-lidded eyes was fixed on the target of my upper belly, and his legs was braced for the collision. Vermilion was the predominant color of his face paint, with an overlay of yellow bolts of lightning.
Almost at my leisure I floated down upon the point of the knife, and when I struck it and thought sort of lackadaisically that I was sure disemboweled, time speeded up again, and I was tumbling over him at great speed and still unwounded, for without willing it I had somehow altered my style of fall and took the blade in my shirt between arm and ribs. It seemed warm there from the close call, from the threat unsatisfied; had I been cut, I would have felt nothing; that is the peculiarity of knifeplay. Well, roll we did through the sand and scrub brush, and he was a powerful Indian though fifty year old. I had lost my pistol, but he kept his knife. Still I sought to talk, but his thumb was into my throat box so far as almost to break through the floor of my mouth. Being small and limber I kneed him frequent in the lower belly, but his iron ballocks sustained these blows without effect, and I missed my chops at the paralyzing neckcord below the left ear.
Soon I was pinned between his thighs, like steel pincers from forty years of pony riding, and now I yearned for the knife to plunge and free me from that compression which had caught me on an exhale and my vision was turning black.
He lifted high the blade, a Green River butcher weapon without a guard, and I won’t forget its slightest property. And then a little hole sprung beneath his chin, and blood begun to burble out of it. He swallowed twice, like to get rid of a little bone that got stuck in his throat. Only then did I hear the shot. His shoulder jerked as though pushed from behind: another shot. He dropped the knife and leaned towards me, the fluid running from his neck, yet his eyes was still open. Then I pushed him in the chest and back he went all the way, bending like rubber at the waist, for his legs was yet locked about my ribs and killing me, and locking my hands together into a kind of sledge, I smote him at the navel: spang! his thigh-grip loosened like a toy when you hit its spring.
Then down leaped that Pawnee Mad Bear from the bank above and putting the muzzle of his Spencer an inch from Shadow’s forehead, he gave him a third shot and a middle eye, and shortly ripped away his hair, which parted with a whap. He smirked at me, tore away Shadow’s breechclout and wiped the scalp upon the dead man’s private parts, saying something victorious in Pawnee.
He had saved my life, sure enough, but I reckon I knew how Younger Bear had felt when I did the same for him them many years before: I wasn’t grateful. Shadow That Comes in Sight had took me on my first raid, having ever been like an older brother or uncle. I was right fond of him. What caught me in the heart now was not that he had been killed, for we all will be sometime. Nor that it had been violent, for as a Human Being he would not have died another way. Nor even that in an involved fashion I had been the instrument of his loss. No, the sadness of it was that Shadow had never known who I was. He had fought me as an enemy. Well, that’s why I was there, wasn’t I, to fight the Cheyenne?
Goddam but he had powerful legs. I still could barely breathe. I got up and watched Mad Bear climb the bank and shortly reappear at its brink on his pony, smugly shake his rifle, and trot away. He hadn’t even commented on the loss of my horse, which had been borrowed from him.
I had not had time to wonder how Shadow happened to be down in this draw in the first place, but now, moving slow for I was mighty sore, as I scratched out a shallow grave for him with his own knife and covered him over, I considered there might be other Human Beings somewhere below among the brush and if they wanted to shoot me in the back, they was welcome to do so. I’d rather that than meet them face to face and see my old friends and brothers.
But I had just got the tip of his long nose covered over with sand when I heard a rustling in the bushes down a ways, and it is queer how my instincts for self-preservation arose without my conscious will, and I seized my fallen revolver and blowed and worked the action clean and replaced all the caps. This in an instant, and then snaked along the bottom of the draw. The brush was trembling, but whatever it could be was staying within. I lurked a moment, then parted the twigs and crept through pistol first, with my face just behind the hammer. I was looking into a clearing just big enough for one person, and that person lay upon her back. She was an Indian woman with her skirt pulled up and her bare legs stretched apart and between them she was giving birth.
The tiny brown head was already emerged, eyes closed and looking a mite peevish at its entry into reality, and now the little shoulders squeezed through. There was never a sound except where that one straining knee was scraping the brush, which I had heard. She watched what went on and bit from time to time into a wad of her buckskin collar; maybe her eyes winced out a drop of moisture, but there was no more commotion than that. She had been there all the while, and that was the occasion for Shadow’s presence and why he fought so hard.
Cheyenne women at such a time always go off by themselves into the brush, and when it is done, come out with the infant and return to work as usual. The only difference here was that she went into labor in the middle of a battle. But the little fellow had to come when he was ready.
I was embarrassed for a variety of reasons, giving birth being an occasion of unusual modesty for a Cheyenne, so much so that I reckon this woman would take Shadow’s death less heavily than my observation of her. Yet I was fascinated, for within half a mile from the soles of my upturned feet the firing had not abated, nor the yells concerning the great day for the Pawnee.… Out of her come the little cleft behind of the infant, tightly pinched together. She strained some more, and then the rest of him emerged smooth as a fish onto the blue blanket spread beneath, and she set up, bit off the cord, tied the baby’s end against his tiny belly, and slapped him into wakefulness, to which he come like a real Cheyenne: with a little start but almost no noise. I expected he already knowed a cry would bring the enemy down on his tribe, so he forbore from loose utterance, and always would. That was also the first and last slap he would ever get from his own kind, while moving into a life that otherwise would know every type of mayhem.
I backed on out of there and went down to the sand heap under which lay Shadow. In a minute she come out of the brush, walking strong and vigorous and matter-of-fact, the child’s head a-peeping from the blanket at her bosom. Eying me, she then went for her belted knife and I reckon might have been a tough customer with it in spite of her newborn. Only I put my revolver forward, which would seem brutal did you not understand by now that a Cheyenne, man or woman, has got a terrible thick skull when it comes to hearing white men.
“Now,” I says, “I am going to shoot you and your child if you don’t listen. Shadow That Comes in Sight was killed by the Pawnee. That was the shot you heard, and then you heard him ride away. If you are related to Shadow then maybe you have heard of Little Big Man, which is what I was called when I lived with Old Lodge Skins’s band. I was a friend of the Cheyenne until they stole my wife and son. That is why I am here now. I am going to take you along with me and trade you for them.”
She studies me through them dark eyes and says: “All right.”
“I don’t like to do this,” I says, “with your newborn and all, but I have no choice.”
“All right,” she answers and sets down, opens her dress under the arm, and puts the infant to feed.
“Look,” says I, “we had better get to open ground. A Pawnee might come upon us here unawares and kill you before I could explain.”
“He must eat first,” she tells me quietly and sets solid.
So I kept my watch upon the rim of the draw during the ensuing conversation. I didn’t know this woman—girl, rather, too young at the time I lived among them to take my notice, if she had been there. I figured her for Shadow’s wife, which accounted for his guarding, but it turned out she was rather one of them young daughters I have mentioned him training, way back, to control her giggle at his funny stories.
“Your husband been rubbed out?”
“By white men,” she says without apparent passion. She was a winsome Indian, when I noticed, having a plump face like a berry and large eyes in a slightly Chinee slant and with a sheen across the underlying tear-sacs; fine though short brow beneath the vermilion parting of her hair. Her shining braids was intertwined with otter-skin, and she wore bright beads, with brass circles in her earlobes.
I started to ask Where, instead of Who, for she probably wouldn’t have told his name, when I heard the pounding of at least three riders on the plain above: unshoed horses, signifying Indians but whether Pawnee or Cheyenne I couldn’t say, and so far as that went, I disliked the approach of either in equal measure. Not speaking Pawnee, I might not get time to use the signs afore they had shot down this woman. If it was Cheyenne, well, that is obvious.
I mention this because you might question what I did next: grabbed that girl and hastened her back into the brush, the infant still at her pap, and crouched there with her, holding her still though she made no resistance.
The Pawnee arrived, for so they were as I could tell from their talk, and apparently inspected the ravine bottom from above but did not come down. Shortly they rode off, after I believe, from the sound, one had voided his water right from the saddle down the bank.
Yet me and the girl stayed where we was for some time, and it came to me that sitting on her heels she leaned her firm body back against me, taking support from it, and unwittingly in clutching her I had got through the side-lacings of the nursing dress and that unoccupied left breast of hers, weighty with milk, lay against my hand. Now I gently cupped it, I don’t know why, for I surely wasn’t lustful in that circumstance. But me and her and the little fellow, who had now went to sleep with his tiny mouth still quavering upon the protruded nipple, we was a kind of family. I had protected them like a father should, and like I had failed to with Olga and little Gus.
She leaned her head back and placed her warm cheek against my forehead. She smelled of suck, that sweet-sourish fragrance, and then of all them Cheyenne things I knowed of old: fire, earth, grease, blood, sweat, and utter savagery.
She says: “Now I believe you. You are Little Big Man, and I will be your wife now to replace the one you lost, and this is your son.” She puts him into my arms, and he wakes briefly up and I’ll swear, small as he was, grins at me with them beady black eyes. I felt right queer.
She says: “I think we had better be going. They will probably collect at Spring Creek.”
“Who?”
“Our people,” she answers as if that went without saying. “The Pawnee had great medicine today, but next time we will beat them and cut off their peckers, and their women will sleep alone and weep all night.”
I was still holding the baby.
“You have a beautiful son,” she says, looking at both of us in admiration, then takes him back. “Do you have any baggage for me to carry?”
I was still sort of stunned and didn’t reply, so she fixes the baby inside her bosom, cinches her belt so as to secure his legs, then crawls up the bank to where my dead horse was laying, takes off the blanket from it and the pad saddle and my coat which I had took off and tied behind, and slides back down. She looked disappointed that that was all she had to tote.
“The wolves will eat my father tonight,” she says. “We should put him on a burial scaffold, but there is no timber here and it is too far to carry him to where there are trees.”
Then she steps back so I can take the lead as a man should. I guess it wasn’t until that moment that I gathered her intent.
“We can’t go back to the tribe,” I says.
“Do you think the white men will let you have a Human Being wife?” she asks. She had a point there, though exaggerated. It wouldn’t be a crime, but it would sure seem odd to Frank North were I to come back from that fight with a family I had suddenly acquired from the enemy. I could of course present this woman and child as legitimate captives, only then they’d be let in for considerable abuse from the Pawnee and later be turned over to the Army at some fort, to be held for exchange with whites taken by the Cheyenne. This was what I had had in mind earlier on, with an idea to control the trade and reclaim Olga and Gus. But right now, at a fairly outlandish moment, I got realistic. I had never received one word that my white family was still alive, and I had checked the forts along the Arkansas. And those along the Platte while working on the railroad.
Truth was, I had just about decided they was dead without admitting it.
I says: “In the mood they’re in at the moment, the Cheyenne will shoot me on sight.”
My woman answered: “I will be with you.”
So that is how I rejoined the Human Beings. I didn’t have no regrets, leaving behind only my horse with the blacksmith in Julesburg and my share in our little hauling business. As to my sister Caroline, I ought to say that just before I had went down to Julesburg, she told me Frank Delight, the whoremaster and saloonkeeper, had asked her hand in matrimony, and she was inclined to entertain the proposition favorably.
I won’t detail our route down the ravine to an intersecting one and then on, coming out behind a hill that obscured us from the Pawnee, no more of which we encountered. And continued mile upon mile of rise and fall, during which night overtook us, and that woman arranged some brush and roofed it with blankets and we slept therein, cheek-by-jowl against the chill you usually get at night upon the prairie, where the wind blows all the time.
The next day we reached Spring Creek and along it found a gathering of the tribe, with remnants like us still coming in. As I expected, I had a close call or two with some of the young Dog Soldiers, but my woman drove them off me like she said she would, for she had a fierce tongue and concentrated purpose.
Old Lodge Skins had got a new tepee since last I seen him, but I recognized his shield hanging before the entranceway.
“Wait here, woman,” I says, and she did as told, and I went within.
“Grandfather,” I says.
“My son,” he greets me, as if I had seen him last two minutes ago. “You want to eat?” He had the most equable temperament I ever knowed in a man.
He looked the same to me when I could make him out, except his eyes stayed closed. I figured he was dreaming, and sure enough he proceeded to paint a verbal picture of the incidents in that ravine.
“I saw you were returning to us,” says he. “There was nothing you could have done for Shadow That Comes in Sight. He knew he would die today and told me so. Our medicine was no good against the many-firing rifles. Perhaps we should not have gone again to the iron road, but the young men wished to destroy another fire-wagon if they could catch one. It is very amusing to see the great thing come snorting and puffing with a spray of sparks as though it would eat up the world, I am told, then it hits the road which we have bent into the air and topples off onto its back, still steaming and blowing, and dies with a big sizzle.”
Next to him I took a seat and we smoked then, of course. And observing that through all this procedure he had not opened his eyes, I decided at length he could not and had the bad manners, maybe, to inquire.
“It is true that I am blind,” he admits, “though the rifle ball did not strike my eyes but rather passed through the back of my neck, cutting the tunnel through which the vision travels to the heart. Look,” he said, opening his lids, “my eyes still see, but they keep it all within themselves, and it is useless because my heart does not receive it.”
His eyes did look bright enough. I reckon it was the nerve which had been cut or stunned in some manner.
“Where did that happen, Grandfather?” I handed him back the long pipe.
He looked some embarrassed, and the smoke stayed inside him a great time before it come gushing from his mouth and nose.
“Sand Creek,” he finally says.
And I groaned: “Ah, no!”
“I remember your advice,” he says, “but we did not go up to the Powder River, after all. Instead we went to the treaty council. I shall tell you how it was. Hump had never attended a conference, and it was one of his needs to own a silver medal like my own. And then our young men said: ‘Why shouldn’t we get presents from the white men for talking to them? We are always in the north, and these Southern Cheyenne get everything.’ I must admit,” Old Lodge Skins goes on, “that I did not myself mind having a new red blanket.
“So that is why we turned around and came back, and we touched the pen with the white men sent by their Father, and Hump received his medal and the young men their new pipe-hatchets, knives, and looking-glasses, and then we were going to the Powder River, but the soldier chief said: ‘You must stay in this place. That is what you agreed to do when you touched the pen.’ But I tell you I did not understand that. However, I know very little about treaties, so I believed the soldier chief was right, and we stayed, though that country was very ugly, with no water and no game. And then the soldiers attacked the village where we were camping with Black Kettle, and they rubbed out a great many of us, and that is where I was hit in the neck and became blind.”
Then I feared the worst and asked after Buffalo Wallow Woman.
“She was rubbed out at Sand Creek,” says Old Lodge Skins. “And White Cow Woman too. And Burns Red in the Sun and his wife Shooting Star. And Hump and High Wolf and Cut Nose and Bird Bear.”
“My brother Burns Red in the Sun.”
“Yes, and his wife and children. And many more, whom I will name only if you intend to mourn them, although that was several winters ago and now they will have reached the Other Side where the water is sweet, the buffalo abundant, and where there are no white men.”
The latter designation he pronounced nowadays in a special way: not exactly hatefully, for Old Lodge Skins was too much a man to sit about and revile his enemies. That was for a loser, like the Rebs what lost the Civil War. And he wasn’t a loser. He wasn’t a winner, maybe, but neither was he a failure. You couldn’t call the Cheyenne flops unless they had had a railroad engine of their own which never worked as well as the U.P.’s or had invented a gun that didn’t shoot straight.
Just to check my impression, I asks him: “Do you hate the Americans?”
“No,” he says, closing up his gleaming though dead eyes. “But now I understand them. I no longer believe they are fools or crazy. I know now that they do not drive away the buffalo by mistake or accidentally set fire to the prairie with their fire-wagon or rub out Human Beings because of a misunderstanding. No, they want to do these things, and they succeed in doing them. They are a powerful people.” He took something from his beaded belt at that point and, stroking it, said: “The Human Beings believe that everything is alive: not only men and animals but also water and earth and stones and also the dead and things from them like this hair. The person from whom this hair came is bald on the Other Side, because I now own this scalp. This is the way things are.
“But white men believe that everything is dead: stones, earth, animals, and people, even their own people. And if, in spite of that, things persist in trying to live, white men will rub them out.
“That,” he concludes, “is the difference between white men and Human Beings.”
Then I looked close at the scalp he stroked, which was of the silkiest blonde. For a moment I was sure it come from Olga’s dear head, and reckoned also he had little Gus’s fine skull-cover someplace among his filthy effects, the stinking old savage, living out his life of murder, rapine, and squalor, and I almost knifed him before I collected myself and realized the hair was honeyer than my Swedish wife’s.
I mention this because it shows how a person’s passion can reverse on the instant he is reminded of his own loss. I had just been moved by Sand Creek, and the next minute was ready to kill him.
Now, Old Lodge Skins took cognizance of my state though blind.
“Have you,” he asks, “a great sorrow or is it only bitterness?”
So I told him, and he never heard of the incident in which Olga and Gus was taken. He could not have lied. I have said that it is amazing what and how Indians know about events far distant from them; but likewise there are things they do not hear. In that era the capturing of white women and children was commonplace. A Cheyenne of one band might not know of those took by another, unless they camped together.
Then Old Lodge Skins said: “Our young men are angry nowadays. Many times they have not the patience to wait to ransom or exchange prisoners, but will become crazy with rage and rub them out. But was that not the voice of Sunshine I just heard outside my tepee? She is the widow of Little Shield, who was killed two moons ago, but now she will be your new wife and give you a new son, so that you have what you had before and better, for of course a woman of the Human Beings is superior to any other kind.”
He wasn’t being heartless, just making the best of likelihoods, as an Indian had to do in the sort of life he lived. His own two wives was massacred, and so he had mourned them for the proper time and then got himself replacements. These last had come and gone in the tepee while we talked: young women, sisters again, probably fifty year below the chief in age, but by God if they didn’t both look pregnant to me.
“All right,” I said. “But I tell you this, that if I find my first woman and my son again, I will take them back from whatever man is keeping them. And if they have been rubbed out, I will kill whoever did it.”
“Of course,” said Old Lodge Skins, for there wasn’t nothing an Indian could better understand than revenge, and he would have scorned me only if I had not wanted it.
There couldn’t have been a worse era for running with the Cheyenne. They was being chased throughout the whole frontier, and whenever they eluded their pursuers, would commit some new outrage against the whites. So I would be on the one hand a renegade to join them, in danger from the whole of my own race. On the other hand, I was under a constant threat from the Cheyenne themselves, for to many of them the very sight of a white face was the occasion for mayhem. I reckon the only thing that saved me was Old Lodge Skins’s band had collected apart from the main force of Chief Turkey Leg, who had commanded the fight at the railroad, so I was most of the time among the group in which I was reared and where the Little Big Man legend still had some power. My woman Sunshine was good protection, and of course Old Lodge Skins too. But there were braves who had growed up since I left the tribe, like young Cut Belly, who one day raided a stage station and come back with a jug of whiskey and says to me:
“I want you to go out on the prairie and hide, because though I do not wish to kill you now, I will when I am drunk. I’m sorry for this, because I am told you are a good man, but that is what will happen.”
Now the best way to get killed was to let a young fellow like that give you orders, so I says: “I think it is you who had better go out on the prairie for your drinking, because the way I am is that something comes over me when I see a drunk, and I have to shoot him, even if he is my brother. I can’t help it; that’s just how I am.”
He took my advice in that instance, and I survived other such threats, but can’t say I was ever popular, which hurt when I recalled my boyhood up along the Powder River as Little Big Man, but I was grown up now and that always involves disappointments. I was real lucky just in that I had still kept my hair. I lived from day to day, and there is a certain sweetness in that style of life, even when you have a long-range purpose as I did, for I was letting it come to me rather than chase it, and knowing it would come, I could live otherwise without apparent point, like an Indian, and eat roast hump when we found buffalo and draw in my slack belly when we didn’t, and lay under a cottonwood and watch my woman Sunshine at hard labor with that little fellow sleeping in the cradleboard lashed to her back. His name was Frog Lying on a Hillside, for we had passed such in fleeing that afternoon of the railroad fight and the tiny child seemed to wake up then and nod at it, and both me and Sunshine believed it was right to let a boy pick his own name.
When we had reached the Indian camp, Sunshine had to mourn for her dead father and though she was quite good at that, weeping and wailing with a horrible din, she had to knock it off whenever she was feeding Frog, and she also never felt free to tear her hair or cut herself up with him on her back. So her kin helped out, all through one night and the next as well, for Shadow had been a man of high repute and it was extra terrible that he didn’t have a scaffold to protect his carcass from the wolves. So these women howled and moaned until they gasped for air, the way a child does what has cried himself hysteric—I mean a white kid; little Indians don’t do that.
Take Frog now, tied up into his cradleboard, with his little head like a brown bean; when he wasn’t sleeping or eating, them sharp black eyes was studying everything within short range and never took displeasure. He reminded me frequently of little Gus, for my boy had had the even temperament of his own Ma, but there was a difference no less marked. Gus was ever delighted in my pocket watch, which I’d hang before him to produce its tick, like everybody does with babies and they is fascinated. Not Frog. It didn’t make him sorry, for nothing did that, but he just cared nought for it: looked through and listened past it, you might say.
Or maybe what did not interest him was the person holding it. Talk as Sunshine did and Old Lodge Skins too of him being my son, Frog himself was not fooled. He didn’t hate me; I was simply to him a kind of device that picked him up on occasion and embraced him, or swung him high into the air and let him down again, and he liked the motion and the contact but acknowledged in it nothing personal.
Then again, maybe the deficiency was mine, for though I liked him, I had had no hand in making him and could see no future for us as boy and Pa, no matter whether I ever found Gus and Olga again or not. The Cheyenne was finished. They knowed it, and I knowed, and little Frog was born into that knowledge. The best I could of done in acting like a father would have been to carry him off to Omaha or Denver and put him in a school. Make him white, bring him up to live in a permanent square house and get up every day and go to work by schedule. But you have seen what he thought of that instrument to measure time.
However, I couldn’t have asked for a more ardent wife than Sunshine. That woman was utterly devoted to me, so much so—and I hate to say this, but it was true—that she commenced to bore me. I reckon the circumstances of our meeting had to do with the respective attitudes of us both. She saw it as a perculiarly touching thing that I had showed up in her hour of grievous need—though she exaggerated that: she was tough enough to have had that baby and escaped by herself—whereas to me she had started out as a burden, which while I freely assumed it there in that ravine as an emergency measure, seemed to gain weight as we lived in the camp.
I have to explain, for as you know the Cheyenne male never does what the white world understands as labor. When not hunting I spent most of my time on the flat of my back beneath a tree or, failing that, in the shade of a tepee. I gambled a little with the other braves and occasionally raced my pony which had been give to me by Old Lodge Skins, but was somewhat leery about winning on account of I didn’t want trouble with the losers. I did not join no war or raiding parties, for nowadays they was always against white men. You might see mine as an impossible position to maintain, but if so you don’t know Indians, whom you can live among on almost any terms but those of outright enmity, and I expect you could even survive the latter situation as long as you had one loyal defender. I had two: the chief and my wife. Sometimes an overwrought young man would come in with a fresh white scalp and offer to insult me with it, but I’d either handle him like I did Cut Belly or look right through him as if he was glass, depending on the situation and my judgment of his character. Or if Sunshine was around, she’d light into him so rough I’d usually end up secretly on his side, for she had a right sharp tongue and I don’t remember as I have said that whereas Cheyenne maidens was shy and soft-spoken, the married women was just the reverse and specialized in themes that in civilization was more common to the saloon than to where ladies gathered. They had license to talk this way, I guess, because in practice they was so respectable. You seldom saw a cut-nosed woman among the Human Beings—did I mention that a Plains Indian clipped off the end of his wife’s nose if she dallied with another man?
Well sir, I suppose a bachelor is at a peculiar disadvantage up against a respectable married woman everywhere in the world, and Sunshine would cast reflection on the young fellow’s potency and speculate unfavorably on the quality of his endowments, etc., with the other women laughing nearby, maybe including some young girl he had a crush on, and away he’d slink, poor devil, having arrived a hero and departed a buffoon.
Now, as if it wasn’t bad enough to be defended by a woman in that style, next Sunshine would get to boasting about me. First it was how I saved her from the Pawnee, and that story growed from what had really happened, us cowering in that bush, to my standing off five or six of them and dropping three. She wasn’t a liar: I reckon that somehow that is what she saw through the distorting spectacles of her recollection. Then of course if she could be vocal about another man’s sexual abilities of which she knowed nothing, think of what she might do with the man on whom she stood as the local authority: I become a champion stud.
And I tell you it embarrassed me to be so characterized, but you know how it is, a person is sometimes the victim of his own vanity, so I fair killed myself trying to live up to my reputation, during the nights under our buffalo robe. Jesus, there was mornings when I couldn’t stand up straight, feeling like I had been kicked by a horse into the small of my back. I guess it ain’t right to tell this, for Sunshine was my wife and though a man can talk endlessly of his adulteries and fornications, the subject is in bad taste when it concerns respectable mating, I don’t know why.
The only way I finally got off the hook was that Sunshine one day turned up pregnant. That must have been about late March of ’68, figuring on the basis of what happened nine months after; otherwise I’d never have had any idea of the time, for by then I had been with the Cheyenne for three seasons and fallen back into the style of dating things by the northward flight of the wild geese, for example, which meant the oncoming of spring, as did the appearance of hair on the unborn calves taken out of buffalo cows we killed.
During all this time we ranged mainly between the Arkansas and the Platte, which is now southern Nebraska and northern Kansas, and there was another railroad building in the latter state: the Kansas Pacific, along the Smoky Hill River, which had been good buffalo country, and so the game grew scarcer and we ate more roots than meat. And the troops was after us, and the Pawnee, but by the superior generalship of Old Lodge Skins, blind though he was, as a village we eluded them all, though our small raiding parties had many a small-scale brush.
Our band continued to live apart from the other Cheyenne, though we’d run into some of them from time to time, and when we would I’d inquire after Olga and Gus. Which was a ticklish business, my being white, and maybe I didn’t always hear the truth. Anyway, it availed me nothing except more close calls, for some of these outfits held other white captives and did not want me snooping around their tepees.
Nor was Old Lodge Skins a deal of help in this matter. His blindness cut down his horny behavior—he couldn’t eye no more fat wenches—but it had strengthened his intention to go his own way. What happened in the fall of ’67 was that the Government signed another treaty with the Southern Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa, and Comanche, by which the Indians agreed to stay down in western Oklahoma, then known as the Nations. A runner found our camp and delivered an invite to Old Lodge Skins, but the chief had had enough of treaties after Sand Creek and wouldn’t attend the conference. Nor did he purpose to abide by that agreement.
“I will not live in that bad place,” he told me, referring to the western Nations. “The grass is poor there, and the water is bitter. And it is properly the country of the Snake People, who I know are our friends now, but they copulate with horses and that makes them strange to me. Also the People of the Rasp Fiddle”—Apache—“come there, and they are brave but extremely ugly, being short and bowlegged and not at all handsome like the Human Beings. A long time ago when we used to fight them, I captured an Apache woman but it was like lying with a cactus, so I sent her back to her people with some presents, which was a great insult.…”
“They tell me Black Kettle attended this conference. I am only too familiar with the kind of treaties to which he touches the pen. I was at Sand Creek with him and lost my family, my friends, and my vision. Without eyes I see more clearly than he.”
Now it might have been to my own interest to want to stay down south, and even urge him to join the main body of the Southern Cheyenne, for if my own family was yet alive, that is where they would probably be. But I couldn’t, just couldn’t. I had a weakness where that old Indian was concerned.
So what I says was: “I can’t understand why you don’t go up to the Powder River. If you had done that when I first suggested it, you wouldn’t have been at Sand Creek.”
“I shall tell you why,” says Old Lodge Skins. “I prefer it in the Powder River country. I was born there, on the Rosebud Creek. Indeed, my medicine works only half-strength when I come below the Shell River,” which is what he called the Platte. “But the Americans, other than a few trappers, do not care about that country. So long as the Human Beings stay there, they will not be bothered by the white men.”
“That is exactly my point,” says I, wondering whether the old devil had lost his wits as well as his sight.
“Yes,” he said, “and I, chief of the greatest warriors on the face of the earth, I should avoid danger like the rabbit? I should let them drive me from this land where I have killed buffalo and Pawnee for eighty summers? A Human Being has always gone wherever he wished, and if someone tried to stop him, he rubbed them out or was killed by them. If I were so cowardly, my people would never respect me. There are many fine young men in this band, and they no longer have the doubts that our warriors had in the earlier days. They have decided to fight the white men wherever they can find them, and rip up those iron rails and drive away the fire wagons. Once that is done, they will kill all the remaining Americans, so that we can hunt again without being bothered and make war on the Pawnee.”
“Grandfather,” I says, “do you honestly believe that can be done?”
“My son,” says Old Lodge Skins, “if it cannot, then the sun will shine upon a good day to die.”
The Beecher Island fight took place, in which five or six hundred Cheyenne cornered fifty white scouts on a sandbar in the middle of the Arickaree Fork and besieged them there for nine days. But the whites was again armed with the Spencer repeaters and held off every charge, killing a good many Indians, among them the great Cheyenne warrior, Roman Nose. Then the cavalry came.
I wasn’t there, but our young men were, and they returned to camp full of weariness and defeat. I stayed inside the lodge for a time so as to avoid incidents, but I would not have had to, the way they was feeling. The Cheyenne still didn’t have no firearms worth the name, and it must make a man feel pretty bad to have the advantage in number but still be beat by the other fellow on account of his superior armament. I had long since buried that pistol of mine and generally kept the Ballard out of sight: no sense in adding to the ill feeling.
So what them Indians got to doing now was trying to lick the problem from the other end and dream up some medicine to make themselves impervious to bullets. One fellow seemed to have made it, for he had been shot at Beecher’s Island through the chest and did some hocus-pocus over the wound and it closed up without unfortunate effect, and he took the name Bullet Proof. So he fixed up several other braves with his medicine and a couple of weeks after the Island fight, they went against the cavalry. Out of seven Human Beings using that medicine, two was immediately rubbed out and Bullet Proof brought them back to camp and tried to raise them from the dead. One twitched his leg a little, stopped, and neither got up. Bullet Proof then admitted his failure.
I reckon it was because of such events that Old Lodge Skins and even his fierce young men had to limit their ambition to mere survival, and after a time we found ourselves with the village of Black Kettle, who the white men in afterdays sometimes called the great Indian statesman, I guess because he was always signing treaties to keep the peace and give away more of the Cheyenne hunting grounds to the railroads and ranchers.
Anyway, that’s how I happened to be at the Battle of the Washita. And as usual, on the side that lost.