Little Big Man

Then I outlived that era, and along about 1920 I got to dropping a few hints to my then acquaintances but went no farther when I seen the look come into their eyes. What with being related to my Pa and Caroline, I am right sensitive to reflections on my sanity.

Oh, since I been in this old-folks’ home and watched them Western shows on the television, I might have made a remark or two, for it gets on my nerves to see Indians being played by Italians, Russians, and the like, with five o’clock shadows and lumpy arms. Redskins don’t hardly ever have to shave, and even the huskiest of them have smooth limbs rather than knotty muscles. As to feature, they don’t look nothing like gangsters. If the show people are fresh out of real Indians, they should hire Orientals—Chinese, Japs, and such—to play them parts; for there is a mighty resemblance between them two, being ancient cousins. Look at them without bias and you’ll see what I mean.

I guess my reasons for mainly keeping quiet boil down to this: Who would ever have believed me? But I am now too old to care. So if you don’t, you can go to hell.

CHAPTER 30 The End

HARDLY HAD THAT vast Indian procession got through the valley where Lavender died when it commenced to break off in fragments which thereupon scattered in every direction, some east to the Tongue and Powder and some farther on to the Slim Buttes area where they was whipped in the following September by General Crook. Some even returned to the reservations.

Sitting Bull and his bunch of Hunkpapa eventually circled around and went on up into Canada, what the Indians called Grandmother’s Land on account of Queen Victoria, and they stayed there awhile, where there was still buffalo, and the Mounted Police give them medals showing the Grandmother’s likeness and says they was welcome as long as they didn’t kill her subjects. Which they did not, for there was hardly any Canadians in that area, and Sitting Bull had such a grudge against Americans that by contrast he loved anyone else. But finally he come back to the U.S., and later toured with Cody’s Wild West show for fifty dollars a week in wages, plus expense money, plus exclusive rights to sell photographs of himself.

Some said that while he had been spiritual leader of the Sioux on the Greasy Grass, he got yellow when Reno attacked the lower end of the camp, and hid out in the hills till the fight was over, not having faith in his own medicine. Gall spread that story, and I don’t know if it was truth or just jealousy.

Getting back to those days immediately following that great fight: Old Lodge Skins decided to take his band south into the Bighorn Mountains. That is, he suddenly turned his pony in that direction, and those who wanted to come along, did. Which sure included me. I was relieved to see that Younger Bear, after thinking for a long time about it, sitting there upon his pinto animal, chose finally to go east with a number of other Cheyenne. He and I had really reached the end of our mutual relations, being square at last. He had never come around to see me again after that morning when he determined I was alive, and I certainly didn’t seek him out.

He had had his great day, and these many years later it does my heart good to think about it, for the Human Beings he went with was badly whipped by General Mackenzie in the fall, and the remnants surrendered the following spring and was sent to that reservation down in Indian Territory where they got the ague and damn near starved. So they broke out, men, women, and children, and fought their way back north for hundreds of mile, under attack all the distance, threadbare and hungry, armed only with bows, for their rifles had been took from them. I reckon when the subject of manliness comes up, you can just say “Cheyenne” and be done with it.

Finally the Government understood that they would either have to be exterminated or let to stay in the country where they was born. So an agency was established on the Tongue River, and the Northern Cheyenne live there to this day.

But there was a lot of agony before that conclusion and I don’t know if the Bear survived it. So I am happy he had at least one big win, and of course I wouldn’t be here if he hadn’t.

Some of the other Indians also went for the Bighorns, but we traveled separate from them and numbered only twenty-odd lodges. Apart from the chief, I didn’t know none of these people. My old friends had all died and gone off. Though I was only thirty-four year of age, I felt in some ways older than I do now. Now it is only one man’s life that is about to end; then it was a whole style of living. Old Lodge Skins had seen it all, up there on Custer Ridge, when he said there would never be another great battle. I didn’t get his point immediately, and maybe you won’t either, for there was many a fight afterward, and mighty fierce ones, before the hostile Plains tribes finally give up and come in permanent to the agencies.