LITTLE BIG MAN

Then, without my asking, Old Lodge Skins said: “That yellow-haired woman of Younger Bear’s died on the long walk north, and their boy, also with yellow hair, was captured from us by soldiers in a fight on Medicine Bird Creek. My son Little Horse was rubbed out at the same place, and many others too, and there was hardly anybody left when we reached this country.

“But once here, we met some more Northern Human Beings, and all the old troubles due to the mistakes of youth were now forgotten, so they welcomed us, and our friendship with the Lakota became very close because the great Oglala named Crazy Horse married a woman of the Human Beings. So we hunted and ate well, for there are still buffalo here, and more people joined us, warriors like Gall and Crow King, and the war chief of the Human Beings, Lame White Man, also Two Moon, and Sitting Bull made medicine, and last week we beat the soldiers on the Rosebud, and today we rubbed out even more on the Greasy Grass, and tomorrow we will kill the rest on the hill.”

I expect you could say Olga had been another who died as a result of what Custer done at the Washita, but he was beyond my holding anything further against him, and anyway she had not been my woman for quite a time. Poor Swede girl: she had a strange life.

As to Gus, in afteryears I looked for him throughout the central plains, but there wasn’t no white men nor Indians who ever heard of Medicine Bird Creek, which must have been its Cheye

And Little Horse gone too, never again to wear them beaded dresses and show his graceful ways.

“I guess it was Younger Bear who conked my head up on the ridge today,” I says.

“Yes,” says Old Lodge Skins. “Then threw a blanket over you and carried you across the river to my tepee. That was not easy to do, for our people went crazy with joy when the last soldier fell, and in the confusion, Indian was killing Indian, and many hands clutched at Younger Bear’s burden so as to rip you apart, but he owed the debt, and also I have no other sons left now but you.”

Finally I fell into a sleep of some hours, the first real rest in a couple of days of hardship and bloodshed. It might sound odd, but I felt safe and right in that tepee with the blind old man a-droning on, though outside, the savage exultation was ever mounting, and I reckon there was more than one Indian who had a sore throat next day and stiffer limbs from dancing than he had got in battle.

But they was most of them up again bright and early to invest that hill where Reno and Benteen was holding on. There wasn’t nothing I could do about that at present though I didn’t like to think of the fact that Lavender, Charley Reynolds, Bottsy, and my other friends was with Reno, unless they had been killed in the valley. But I was confined to Old Lodge Skins’s tepee by my own desire, one white man somewhere in the middle of that enormous assemblage of lodges me and Custer seen from the bluffs the day before.

I woke up remarkably improved as to physique, though, my shoulder right tender but a lot of the stiffness had gone already and I could almost feel that moss or whatever it was drawing the rest of it out. I had thought the ball-joint had been busted, but if it was, it somehow healed too in the succeeding days and give me fewer twinges throughout the years since than that old wound in my other shoulder where I got shot in Dodge City.

My facial crease also was knitting up under the mud plastered there, and I didn’t know I had it unless I laughed-which I wasn’t doing much of at present.

Old Lodge Skins was still sitting there when I awakened and investigated my hurts. It was another warm, bright day outside, the sun half penetrating the tepee cover, the fire gone to white ash.

“Who was the doctor?” I asks him.

“Younger Bear,” says he. “Do you want to eat now?”

One of them fat wives of his come in then from her cooking fire outside, bringing me a bowl of boiled buffalo. Everything was going on as normal, for Reno’s hill was across from the upper end of the camp, whereas the Cheye

I took the bowl from her who handed it to me without expression, and ate some, and then I said: “Grandfather, do you want to hear what I was doing with the soldiers?” For he never would have asked.

“I am sure you had a very good reason,” says he. “Let us smoke first.”

So we exchanged the pipe, and then I says: “Do you know who led the bluecoats? General Custer.”

He tried two or three times but was unable to pronounce the name, nor of course did it mean aught to him.

“Long Hair,” I says. “Only now it is cut short.”

“Now it is probably cut off,” says he, laughing at his typical Indian humor.

“The Washita,” I says. “He led the bluecoats there.”

“Oh, yes.” Old Lodge Skins nodded pleasantly. “I remember that fight. It was bad, but we rubbed out many soldiers in the tall grass.”

Well, I was stubborn as him, and persisted: “Did no one ever talk about who led the soldiers there?”

“A white man,” says the old chief. “They were all white, except for some Osage scouts, so it must have been a white man whom they followed, for nobody would follow an Osage.” Then he got to telling experiences of his own in fighting the Osages as a young man, and it was ever so long before I could get back to the subject.

“This man used to wear his hair down to his shoulders,” I says.

Old Lodge Skins asks: “Like a Human Being?”

“No, he didn’t braid it.”

“Then like a white woman,” says the chief. “Was he a heemaneh?”

I was sure getting the worst of it. Now it may seem fu

But I guess I could never get that across to an Indian, for independence was the rule rather than the exception amongst them and thus not the occasion for any special merit. Nor could any one of them, no matter how exalted-not Crazy Horse not Sitting Bull nor Gall-order two hundred others to perish along with him. That was the difference. Whatever Custer believed, he did not die alone. So while as a Caucasian you could call him a man of principle, from the Indian point of view you might say he had no principles at all. Especially since soldiers, unlike savages, did not fight for fun.

I decided to drop the subject, but as I might have figured, Old Lodge Skins now got right interested in it. He says: “I want to go see this unusual man, or whatever is left of him, my son. Will you lead me to the ridge?”

I’d sooner have made my bed in a campfire. But Old Lodge Skins pointed out that the warriors was all miles upstream, and the women and children had got finished with most of their mutilating and stripping the bodies on the evening before, so it would be quiet there, and I could put on a buffalo hat like Younger Bear’s and leather shirt and leggings, painting my face. Not to mention I would be with him.

Well, them wives of his helped me into the new getup, cutting down an extra pair of the chief’s leggings, and a couple little kids was also there, his I reckon and only six-seven years old and him at least ninety by now, and I needed a breechclout, so one of them women handed me a company guidon of the Seventh Cavalry, which was a swallowtailed version of the Star and Stripes. I am happy to report for the sake of fellow patriots that I never employed it for this purpose. I don’t curse in front of ladies and don’t degrade the national colors, not even in an emergency: I used my old banda