Well sir, sodbusting never held no attraction for yours truly, that’s for sure. I kept on moving north, and I’ll tell you why. Once again, it was curiously connected with the activities of George Armstrong Custer. Who by the way I was not looking to assassinate no more; no, unless I get revenge within a reasonable length of time after the offense is committed, I can’t keep up an active hatred for anybody. I reckon that’s a weakness of my character. I mean, I missed him in Kansas City in ’71, and then I got involved in reclaiming Amelia, and what with one thing another, eight years had went by since Washita. I guess most of us have got a sort of statute of limitations within our hearts; unless a man is a lunatic, violent feelings taper off after a while.
So though it was unlikely that Custer would ever become my personal hero, I had lost my former desire to do him in. I did not think about him at all, and when, in the summer of 1874 I heard he come back to the plains and led a column into the Black Hills to map that region, it never interested me none.
But as it happened, some scientists he carried along on that expedition found certain deposits in the area, and the journalists got hold of the report and spread it across the country:
GOLD!
The Land of Promise-Stirring
News from the Black
Hills.
The Glittering Treasure Found at Last
A Belt of Gold Territory
Thirty Miles Wide.
The Precious Dust Found in the
Grass under the Horses’ Feet
– Excitement Among
The Troops.
It Can be Reached in Six Days-Expeditions
Forming All Along the Frontier.
The Black Hills had been guaranteed to the Sioux in the treaty of ’68 after they run out the Army and burned down the forts along the Bozeman Trail, and it was a mighty nice piece of property, heavily forested and containing bear and elk. Pa Sapa is what the Lakota called it, the “sacred hills,” for the Indians considered as divine any piece of ground that grew so much wood and animals. A white man on finding such a place that held everything he needed would move in and use it to the hilt. But not a redskin; he restrained himself.
I had been there once as a boy. Beforehand, Old Lodge Skins prayed a good deal and had a vision in which we would get six elk, two bear, and twenty-seven tepee poles, so that is exactly what we took from the Black Hills and nothing more, and left its dark-blue forests and silver streams as quiet as we found them. At that time we would not have known what to do with gold if we come across it.
But I had since changed remarkably. So that is why I now proceeded up towards Dakota Territory: I wanted some of that gold. I hadn’t got much of it in the Colorado rush of ’58, but I was white man enough to try again.
I wasn’t trailing Custer no more, nor was I looking for Indians. But I sure found them both.
CHAPTER 24 Caroline
IT WAS THE SPRING of ’76 when I reached the town of Cheyenne, in southern Wyoming, which was a stop on the Union Pacific and an outfitting place for the Black Hills gold rush.
Owing to the treaty with the Sioux, white men was supposed to keep out of the Hills altogether, no matter what their purpose; and the Army would turn back any expeditions they caught trying to enter. But there was a real difficulty in policing such an expanse of ground with only a few regiments. You might say any would-be miner who was kept away from the diggings by the U.S. Army wasn’t trying. For all they’d do if they found him was to say no. He wasn’t arrested or nothing, and once beyond the next rise, he could circle around the troops and continue towards his original aim.
However, even this much harassing caused popular peevishment back in the settlements. It was like the Colorado rush again: progress versus savagery; the Army should go in and wipe out the Indians rather than prohibit fellow whites from making a pile. For the Sioux had not sat still for the invasion, though they did not start seriously killing right away. They actually turned back some of the early-comers without sending them under, which I think showed remarkable patience.
I had no sooner got to Cheyenne-the Wyoming town, not the tribe; there wasn’t no Human Beings there; if they had been, they would have been shot on sight-than I come across two fellows having a terrific fight on the main street. So, being I never had no business that couldn’t wait, I went to watch them, and who did I make out on the losing end of it but my sister Caroline.
Now that was too much for me, seeing some bastard beat up my sister, though his reasons might have been of the best and though he was smaller than her, so I was fixing to drop him as soon as they drawed apart a little and I could get in a fair shot. So when he hit Caroline a mighty blow upon the jaw and she chewed dirt, I went for my brand-new Colt’s Peacemaker, but before I could raise it a fellow alongside me in the crowd says: “Well sir, I reckon that proves which is the real one.”
A curious comment and lucky it was, for it kept me from murder. I asks: “Real what?”
“Real Calamity Jane,” says he, then lets out some tobacco juice to fall between his boots. “Them two bitches is fighting over’n it. That there big redhead was claiming the title up at the bar, and then t’other come in and called her and they went for each other.”
I put my gun away and looked at Caroline’s opponent a-standing there with her fists cocked over my sister’s recumbent body, and I saw the ugliest woman in the world, and she was cursing at the moment and I’ll tell you her prowess at that art was such as to make Caroline’s foulest mouth, as I recall it, sound like hymn singing.
Calamity Jane: I had heard the name around but never run into the specimen before. She had a face like a potato and was built sort of dumpy, and when she seen that Caroline was down for good, she prodded her with a boot, spat onto the street, and picking up the sombrero what had fell off in the fight and clapping it back upon her man’s haircut, she swaggered into the saloon.
You remember that time Caroline rescued me from drink by dunking me in a horse trough? Well, she was too big for me to return the favor, so I just filled the crown of my hat with water from the same and flang it into her face. Upon which she woke up, snarling: “Where’s that whore? I’ll kill her!”
I set back upon my heels. I said: “You been whipped, Caroline, and I believe you richly deserved it if you was pretending to be Calamity Jane. What did you want to do that for?”
Well, it took a minute or two for her to gather herself and realize who I was, but she was still too upset to express much affection for her brother, so I helped her up and she was all right though bruised and with a purplish eye and a cut lip and a bald patch where some of her hair had been tore out at the roots and the lobe of her one ear had been bit almost clear through. But I found a Doc and he dosed some liniment on her and it looked like she would live, so we went to a restaurant and she eat a steak as big as my back and about five pound of potatoes fried in grease.