Little Big Man Page 20

  I ain’t going into detail how I survived there, but it was barely. I sold my clothes, I cleaned outhouses, I begged, and I stole. Within a month after I stopped being Mrs. Pendrake’s pampered son, I was a dirty old bum sleeping in the back of stables.

  Don’t ask me about the theatrical exhibitions they had in St. Louie or the fine stores or the great eating places or the luxurious boats that plied the Mississippi River, for my knowledge of them extended no further than the outside, where I’d stand as a ragged beggar, collecting very little, until rousted by the police constables.

  But St. Louie was quite a center for the trade going west, and in time I had a bit of luck: got myself hired on as guide for a mule train of yardgoods and such heading for Santa Fe in New Mexico. Which took some lying, though of course I could back it up with my fluent Cheyenne. I had never been to Santa Fe, but I found out that from years of travel the trail was plainly marked, so figured to have no trouble in guiding along it. Anyway, them fellows what owned the train was dumb as hell and not hard to convince of anything unlikely. They hadn’t never been west of St. Joe, but had raised all the money they could for this expedition, on which they expected to make a pile in one shot out of what they believed to be a bunch of stupid greasers. Their names was the Wilkerson Brothers.

  What happened to change their plans was that the Comanche jumped us, killed both Wilkersons along with all the mule skinners, and stole the goods and burned the wagons. This disaster occurred along the Cimarron River after we had crossed the fifty mile of waterless plain from the Arkansas.

  You notice I wasn’t myself killed in this set-to. In fact, I wasn’t even wounded. I just knowed how to handle myself, and when everybody else was down, didn’t see no further reason to keep standing off fifty savages when all I had to do it with was one old muzzle-loader.

  Well, there I was, within a barricade of cases of our trade goods, and the circle of screeching Comanche was drawing tighter, and you fire once from a muzzle-loader and then spend the next fifteen minutes recharging it: if you’re faced with more than three of the enemy, they could almost have beat you to death with their hands before you found your ramrod. So I was forced to employ that weapon I carried on top of my neck. I remembered that invaluable story of Little Man again!

  Down behind the barricade, I quick stripped off my shirt, made a ball of it about the size of my head, and jammed my felt hat onto it, with the brim down low, which is the way a man would wear it in the bright sun along the Cimarron. I had a jacket, too, and got back into it, pulling in my neck like a turtle and buttoning the garment right up over my head. The arms hung loose, with my own inside, and I slipped one hand up and held that shirt-head, wearing the hat, onto the jacket neck.

  Up I rose, about six feet five to the crown of the hat, looking out of a peephole between the top jacket buttons, and started to walk towards the galloping ring of Snake People. All I had to rely on was their knowing the legend of Little Man the Great Cheyenne. And you can be sure that before they made up their minds, they kept firing arrows at me for a spell and one went through the limp arm of my jacket.

  But directly they begun to slow down to a trot, then to a walk, still encircling but fascinated. Well sir, here goes, I thought; I’m going to shoot my wad. At that point I had passed the body of one of the Wilkersons, looking blank towards the sky and with two arrows in his chest. I pitched that fake head right off my fake shoulders. It hit the ground and rolled, but I had balled it tight and the hat never come off.

  The Comanche stopped dead. I remember thinking: I’ve got you sons of bitches now, ain’t I? Oh, ain’t I? I had forgot Little Man’s war song or I’d have sung it.

  But I didn’t have them by no means. A warrior suddenly rode over, picked up the shirt-head on the point of his short lance, looked at it and throwed it away, and then they took me captive.

  Well, you can’t call it a failure. Had I not done it, they would have killed me. And I learned a valuable lesson: Don’t try to fool an Indian who has seen a lot of white men. The Comanche had been raiding the Santa Fe Trail for forty years.

  They didn’t treat me bad, and I reckon they intended to trade me off for guns or something, but having been put to herding their horses for them, one night I stole one and rode off. It was fast and hard travel, and before long he died on me and I continued to New Mexico on foot. It was the end of summer before I reached Taos, in the mountains north of Santa Fe. For quite a time I hadn’t seen a town of any description, so I was rather cheered just to see the Pueblo Indians’ dwellings there, though I never could get up much affection for that type of redskin, who was always farmers and lived clustered together like bats from time immemorial. With the whole world open to them, they settled down and raised little patches of beans. The Comanche used to raid them every once in a while and so did the Navaho and Apache. A wild Indian don’t like a tame one.

  There was a white town down the trail a piece from the Indian one, so I went on down there. I was sure a sight after those weeks in desert and mountain. I’d kneel down and drink from a pool with my eyes shut so as not see my ugly reflection.

  So I can’t blame a famous hero for what he done when I showed up at his front door. I saw this adobe house, see, built around one of them inner courtyards, and I figured this was where I might get a handout. So I goes onto the veranda, and the door was open for it was hot weather, and I calls into the cool, dark interior: “Anybody to home?”

  A fellow about my size, short that is, with a sandy mustache and real bandylegs, appears from the shadows within and says: “Git on out of here, you hairy son of a whore.”

  And I did, for he was real mean-looking. Later some Mexican off whom I begged a couple tortillas told me that was Señor Kit Carson.

  In a day or so I reached Santa Fe, down in its valley among the mountains, with its Mex women in their bright colors and naked shoulders, and Pueblo Indians sitting about selling their junk and a Ute or two in red blankets walking arrogant around, and Spanish cowboys in them tight pants slitted at the ankle, along with the more usual types you might see anywhere. That was quite a town for the time and place, but you would never have known it by one look. Most everybody lived in them adobe houses, which is no more than dried mud; consequently they seem a little childish at first, like some kids patty-caked them together. Even the Governors’ Palace off the town square was of this construction. If St. Louie was your idea of a city, you wouldn’t have thought much of Santa Fe, which one good rain would have turned into a hog wallow.

  It was all right with me, though, and I did a lot better there than in St. Louie. I don’t mean I got rich, nor tried to. I took up with a fat Mexican woman who sold chili con carne, tamales, and the like right on the street, also cooked them there over an open fire. She took pity on me for being so skinny, was how it started. Before long I had moved into her little ’dobe house, which we also shared with five or six of her kids, but her husband run off or been killed, she wasn’t sure which. Sometimes she’d believe the first, in which case she’d threaten me with him coming back and knifing me; and sometimes the other, and would want me and her to go to the priest and get hitched.

  Estrellita was always yelling and scolding, and occasionally would get sufficiently riled so as to threaten to knife me herself, but I discovered that was the Mexican temperament, and it was easy to get her in a good mood again by doing some romantic thing like calling her “my little chili pepper” or whatnot. Speaking of peppers, my stomach was ruined for years by that Spanish grub and it put more calluses on my tongue than I had on my hands during these months. For I didn’t do no work. I just laid around all day in the shade, and then in the evening, when the air had cooled enough so that the effort of walking wouldn’t upset me, I’d summon up enough energy to drag myself to a cantina and lay into glass after glass of pulque, which Estrellita give me the money to buy.

  I was morally very low at this time, and just sixteen. I reckoned it run in the family, having seen my brother Bill, and didn’t wo
rry none. If you want to really relax sometime, just fall to rock bottom and you’ll be a happy man. Most all troubles come from having standards.

  I might have died of a bad liver, what with that diet, but I was saved by an old-timer I run into in that cantina. This fellow was about seventy, had a face of white hair, a speech defect which he claimed come from Apache torture when a lad, and professed to be a expert on locating gold. Everybody called him Crazy Charley, or Loco Carlos, depending on their lingo, and you can gather from that what they thought of his ability as a prospector.

  The reason I took up with Charley, to the extent of buying him drinks with Estrellita’s hard-earned money, was my natural weakness for people with a positive vision. He might have been a penniless old drunk, but there wasn’t any getting away from it that he talked an excellent idea. After prospecting for fifty years, he claimed to have located the biggest lode of gold in the “organized world” (which is how he referred to it, for Charley always talked mighty grandiose), and just at that point the Ute stole his pack animals, to which was lashed all his tools, and trailing them he got lost in the desert without water, lost his mind for a time, wore out his boots, and walked all the way to Taos in his bare feet. In spite of these “horrendous misadventures,” he remembered exactly where that gold was: in a region of Colorado between the Arkansas River and the South Platte.

  Charley would take a sip of liquor, roll it around in his toothless mouth, swallow with his whiskers aflutter, and say: “If I had your pecuniary endowments, sonny, I’d buy a set of possibles and ram-bunculate northwards, coming back within six months as a man of means beyond the dreams of algebra.” That is near as I can come to his style, and you must also realize that all the s sounds was slurred owing to that scar on his tongue. “Shunny” is actually what he called me. When he finished that drink, and if I wouldn’t buy him no more, around the room he’d go and make such a nuisance of himself that the big Mex who owned the place would throw him out the door sooner or later, and when you’d leave, there he’d be, sleeping alongside the road with the pigs rooting nearby.

  Then one day word reached Santa Fe that gold had been struck on Cherry Creek in Colorado, right in that area what Charley always talked about. From a bum he turned into quite a hero. He could have drunk free on it for some time, and immediately got all kinds of offers to head the expeditions that started to outfit at once. But soon as he was vindicated, Charley become uppity. “Go pound sand up the aperation of your hindquarters,” he told them others. “It was Shunny here who give me refreshment, and it be him I’ll make rich.”

  It wasn’t until well into the fall of ’58 that we got to Colorado after a wearing trip, for on the way we was raided by Apache and I took an arrow in my leg, fell down, and knocked myself out. When I come to, our horses and mules was gone and the cantina owner’s cousins as well. “They go under?” I asked old Charley, who appeared all right himself, just setting there rubbing his toothless gums with a finger while his rheumy eyes was fixed on the horizon.

  “Oh,” says he, “I had to deliver them over to the Apache. It didn’t enthrall me with pleasure to do it, but you and me would never reach the gold if I hadn’t.”

  Like most of the border Indians, the Apache had a peculiar grudge against Mexicans. So as to be able to kill the three cousins in some excruciating manner, they had let me and Charley go. He was a treacherous old goat, I think you will agree. And while I should maybe have thanked him, the result was I got very little sleep thereafter, for now we had nobody extra to give away if the need occurred but me. And I was wounded, not serious but for a time I couldn’t do no running.

  We did not encounter any more Indians, but our gear was gone now and our guns, so all we could bring down in the way of game was rattlesnake, by club, which however wasn’t the worst victual in the world providing you could knock it dead without prejudicing yourself.

  Charley was supposed to know the territory, but had forgot it owing to his years of drinking. His memory could have come back, he said, with a drink of spirits, but we didn’t have none of course. I myself would have settled for a drink of muddy water by the time we was wandering hopelessly in the Great Sand Dune area of southern Colorado. We would sure have died there had not that party trailing us come to our rescue.

  You must have got the point by now: Charley was the world’s worst prospector. He just didn’t know his profession. That was a revelation to me. I had thought if a fellow practiced a trade, he would naturally be good at it. But that ain’t true. He can be awful at it all his life.

  In our condition at the time they found us, we couldn’t very well refuse to let that party throw in with us, and we at last arrived at Cherry Creek just as winter set in. The rest of the world had got there before us, owing to newspaper accounts all across the country. There was about eighty cabins already built, and in case you don’t know it that was the start of Denver, Colorado, though they called it Auraria for the first couple years.

  I got no intention of going into detail on the luck we had at prospecting for gold. Near as I can gather, all gold strikes is about the same: somebody pans a little dust, has to shoot off his mouth about it, so that thousands of others come rushing to the place, no single individual gets much owing to the congestion, and then finally some big outfit buys up most of the claims and makes a business of it with the proper machinery. Those who come out best are them who service those what are looking for the gold: the fellows that set up stores and saloons, etc., for early in the game they can get whatever they charge and have their bundle made by the time the smoke clears.

  The following spring and summer there was supposed to have been a hundred and fifty thousand come to Colorado along the Platte, the Arkansas, and the Smoky Hill rivers. That was the time of PIKE’S PEAK OR BUST painted on the sides of wagons, for a lot of them had to announce it in that stupid way, then two-thirds went on back home by the end of the year, at which time they printed BUSTED, BY GOD below the other slogan.

  Me and that bunch of ours, we tried gold for a while, got us a claim, even built a sluiceway real scientific, for there was seven or eight of us, but it didn’t pay off much. Oh, there was gold there, we got out seventy-eighty dollars’ worth of dust in three months and only used up about a hundred dollars’ worth of pick handles and shovels, and didn’t have no time to hunt, so had to buy food that would have been cheaper at the finest hotel in St. Louie, and then most of the gold we derived from that effort was spent by Charley for whiskey and one of the Mexicans for whores, for you take the latter, they appear at every gold strike shortly after the first nugget is found.

  But some of us was too shrewd to go on long at that sort of thing: I don’t mean me, I never knew anything about business, but a couple of them fellows, John Bolt and Pedro Ramirez, they organized a general store shortly and set up a regular supply train down to Santa Fe and back for goods, and I was wagonmaster of it. We did all right and made a nice piece of money which was divided up amongst the three of us left from the original crowd, for a couple others was killed in saloon arguments and Charley disappeared. He turned out to have gone back to Santa Fe, where he hung around the cantina again talking of the old days in Colorado and mooched drinks, and slept with the hogs.

  Even though that regular trip would have put me in the range of Estrellita again, that worked out all right for she had herself another man by the first time I come back down the trail. She also had herself a new kid—which might have been mine for all I know, but I was real irresponsible in them days, being only seventeen myself. If so, and if he’s still alive, he’d be only about ninety-four today.

  It was during this period that I bought myself a horse, an Indian pony in fact is what he was, and pinto, but I got him off some white fellows who come to Denver with a herd of them. I also procured my first handgun, a Colt’s Dragoon, cap-and-ball, and I practiced with it on the run to Santa Fe till I was good enough to eat no man’s dirt and stay alive, which ain’t easy when you are my size: it must have been along
in these years that I growed to five foot four and stopped forever. I got a pair of built-up boots made to my measure in Santa Fe that added two inches onto that, and I also wore a Mex sombrero with a high crown: it was black and trimmed with silver. In outline I was six foot tall, but quite a bit of that was air.

  Not far from the white settlements in early Denver was a big camp of Arapaho, who as you know was close friends of the Cheyenne, and occasionally little parties of the Human Beings themselves would troop through the vicinity. I didn’t see anybody I knew, but on the other hand I never looked very hard. I don’t know why I should have had this disinclination, for I was white and doing what whites are supposed to, but the fact was that I felt kind of shameful as regards the Indians.

  I would be feeling right good and then see a little band of redskins riding along and fall into melancholy. I could never remember how shabby Indians was until I saw some. Not because they was always poor; there was something awfully seedy about an Indian when he was by his lights dressed to the nines. Old Lodge Skins in his best turn-out looked like something the cat drug in by white standards. Now I never noticed this much till I had been to the Missouri settlements and back.

  Our store was first in a tent and then as business grew, we built us a wooden structure, and in between the Santa Fe trips I’d be around there for a spell. Some of the Arapaho got to dropping by with skins to trade, and game if they had any extra. And that’s when I noticed how much an Indian stunk. Get three of them indoors and you could hardly breathe for the aroma. We just couldn’t tolerate their presence inside the wood building, so the Indian trade was carried on outside in an open shed. Their goods wasn’t worth much anyway; by the time they got around to bringing in a haunch of fresh venison, it was half-spoiled and crawling with maggots, and the hides was poorly dressed and stiff as lumber.

  After you had seen that soda fountain in Missouri, and them cunning boots that a fellow like Angelo could turn out, and Mrs. Pendrake in her hoop skirt with the understructure of whalebone, you just couldn’t avoid noticing that Indians was crude, nasty, smelly, lousy, and ignorant. You know I was predisposed in their favor, and it wasn’t easy for me to admit the truth. But I got to hating them now, which is why I felt shameful, so I never owned up to my partners that I had any more connection with redskins than the next white man. I didn’t have too much to do with the retail workings of the store anyway, so it was easy to slip aside when the Arapaho showed up to trade.