LITTLE BIG MAN

“Why,” I says, “did Younger Bear become a Contrary?”

As I relied upon the chief to do, he give the traditional reason: “Because he was afraid of the thunder and lightning.”

“That’s why I have to ride west with my mule wagons,” I says. And, you know, there was a certain truth to the statement.

The way that treaty finally turned out, I was proud to have played a part in sending my friends out of harm. Black Kettle, White Antelope, and the other Southern Cheye

CHAPTER 14 We Get Jumped

THE MASSACRE AT SAND CREEK took place in ’64, late in the year. By then the Rebellion was finished out that way or it couldn’t have happened at all, for the troops would have been otherwise occupied.

Speaking for myself, I turned into an indoor type of person after that trip to and from Missouri with the mules. I had got this idea of becoming a big-shot businessman and maybe going into politics. I had also begun to be suspicious of my so-called partners Bolt and Ramirez, who was supposed to split even with me, but how could I check on that if I was always out on the trail? To confirm this, you should have heard their protests when I says I was going to stay around the store from now on.

Well, I didn’t understand much of account-keeping, so I never could prove what they had stole from me in the past, but my take increased noticeably from the time I stopped going on trips. And the next things I did was build me a house and get married!

I was about twenty at the time. The woman I married-girl, rather, she being eighteen-was a Swede, born in Sweden, come to this country a few years back with her folks and settled at Spirit Lake in Iowa, where her Ma and Pa was killed in the famous massacre carried out by an outlaw band of the Santee Sioux. That was five years before, so she was still small enough to hide in a potato cellar, which she did and survived. This girl was named Olga. At the time I married her, it would have took a larger cave to hide her: she was five nine if she stood an inch and had the weight to accompany it though not an ounce of fat. She was something larger than myself even when I wore my built-up boots.

Olga was real fair-complected, with hair so light and fine that even on a rainy day it looked like the sun was shining on her. She had come out to Denver with some folks who took her in after the trouble, in return for which they got an awful lot of work out of her: she cooked their meals, minded the children, did the cleaning, and chopped all the wood, while the woman laid around the cabin in a sour mood and the man was always trying to put his hand on Olga’s bottom.

I took a fancy to her first time I ever seen that girl, not just because she was pretty, which she was, and that extra size made her twice as attractive for my money, but mainly for the reason that she was the best-natured person I ever knowed. It was just about impossible to rile that girl, and I always had a weakness for tolerant women. For example, she never had the slightest suspicion that that family had got at least a 300 per cent return on what little they done for her. After we was married, it was all I could do to keep her from going back to them every afternoon and doing their chores when she had finished with ours.

By the following year me and Olga had ourselves a kid and I got that house built I mentioned, a right nice dwelling place of all wood construction with a peaked roof and four rooms. It couldn’t yet compare with the Pendrakes’ residence but it was good for Denver. That baby Olga had was a boy and we named him Gustav after her Pa what was killed by the Santee, and even as an infant he looked exactly like a Swede with his corn-yellow hair and blue eyes.

My boyhood amongst the Cheye

“Then what do you use for your everyday money?” I asked. Ramirez laughed with his strong white teeth, but Bolt said soberly: “Credit, of course. We got civilization here now, Jack, which runs not upon money as such but rather the idea of money. Take those Indians that trade with us: they bring in an animal pelt and want for it something of equivalent value on the instant. It would never occur to them to set up an account with us, according to which they could draw supplies and other goods whenever they needed them, the retail price of these to be entered against their names to be defrayed by deposits of skins at a later time.

“By this means they could even out the highs and lows of their savage economy and live according to the same standard the year around, lean times and fat, paying back in periods of good hunting what they put on credit in bad.”

Well, he had a lot more to say about the theory of business, and how him and Ramirez preferred to reinvest their shares in the store rather than walk about spending dollar by dollar. They had charge accounts at the barber shop and the saloon, etc., and as to most of their other needs, they took them from our own merchandise and entered a charge against themselves in the books, as opposed to my own practice of buying Olga some yardgoods, say, and putting the actual money for it in the cashbox, though I would of course take an owner’s discount.

But now as to that other thing he would mention so often: that our partnership was founded on no more than a handshake. He was right proud of this, whereas to me it was a cause of some worry. I guess why he spoke of it so often was that I suggested with about the same frequency that we get legal papers drawed up.

However, by this tactic they succeeded only in raising my suspicions to the point where I had to put my foot down as I did with that sign, and we hired a lawyer and he made up the papers by which my third was certified. Or at least that’s what I thought, for I studied them documents very carefully, being able to read as you know. But I reckon legality has a language all its own.

Olga was a great comfort to me, and one of the main reasons why she was is that she had never learned too much English, and I of course couldn’t speak a word of Swede. Not being able to talk much to each other, we got along wonderful, and never exchanged a cross word.

That kid of ours, little Gus, he was a right cu

Then one day in the late fall of ’64, Bolt and Ramirez suddenly blowed town, leaving me with all that credit of theirs to make good. For that is what our agreement done, I then discovered: give me sole legal responsibility for the business and all debts in its name, and I have already suggested to you that them fellows even put their haircuts and shaves on the company account.