Return of Little Big Man Read Free Page A

whole works again here, with everything else I got to tell. So if you want to hear what really happened at the so-called Battle of the Little Bighorn, go find Snell.*
    Where I’m starting in here is not long after that fight, and just after the death of Old Lodge Skins, the Cheyenne chief who was like a father to me.
    *Editor’s note: The late Ralph Fielding Snell published the reminiscences of Jack Crabb’s early life under the title Little Big Man, in 1964.

1. Deadwood
    O LD LODGE SKINS WAS the finest man I ever knew, and though I spent years apart from him, I guess it was always in the back of my mind that he would live forever, so that any time I needed to, I could go back and find him and get him to set me straight about things of the spirit, which I have found apply to all people whatever their material ways.
    He killed plenty of his fellow men and scalped them to boot, and took torture, given or received, in stride, but he had what in my experience up to then, and in fact since, was unique: a firm grasp of a lot of fundamentals, and he always knew where his center was, a knowledge which has eluded me for much of my existence.
    I was still in the Indian garb my Cheyenne friends had give me so I wouldn’t be slaughtered on the Greasy Grass battleground, and I had stayed for a spell with Old Lodge Skins’s little band in the Bighorn foothills. Some of the rest of the big encampment which Custer had rashly attacked went north with Sitting Bull after the fight was over, up to Grandmother’s Land, which is what they called Canada, after Queen Victoria, whose image they saw on some medallions presented them in years past by the Canadians.
    I had had my own grievance against Custer, whose attack on the Cheyenne camp on the Washita, years earlier, had resulted in the loss of my Indian wife and child, and thought for a while I’d kill him if I could, but I never got the chance, and now that somebody had done it with no help from me, I both lacked a feeling of satisfaction and a sense of purpose as to what I’d do with the rest of my life.
    I also had my hide to think of. Now that Old Lodge Skins wasn’t there to vouch for me, some of the other Indians, too young to remember my years with the Cheyenne, might get to wondering why I was hiding out amongst them, wearing a breechcloth and leggings, having been too polite for such wonderment while he was alive. Not only do Indians have natural good manners, but they reverence their elders. I was worried now that if I went back to camp and told of the old chief’s death, some of the more excitable individuals might believe I rubbed him out and wanted to take over his power, all ten cents’ worth of his material possessions, and his wives, the latest of whom was quite young and, despite his advanced age, showing a swollen belly.
    But I’d have a better chance there than looking for the U.S. Army dressed as a Cheyenne, and I didn’t have no access to a change of wardrobe at the moment, unless I wanted to ask a warrior to loan me some of the clothes he stripped off the corpses of the Seventh Cavalry. Any white soldiers I encountered in the region would want to know what I was doing there, however I was dressed, and given their state of mind after the Custer defeat, I would of had a hard time convincing them, having lost, at least temporarily, my gift for verbal invention.
    Indeed the events of recent days had taken the heart out of me. I hadn’t rejoiced at the sight of two hundred dead of my own kind, and there was plenty red men too who had died at the Little Bighorn, having been no enemies of mine. Now Old Lodge Skins was gone. I tell you I could have sat down and cried like a white person, or sung Indian songs of grief and mourning, or maybe both, but I did neither. That part of the world was far too perilous to let sentiment affect your provisions for safety. What I had to do was get out of there pronto, my expressions of bereavement done in silence, in the heart.
    I