marked the end of the Plains Indian way of life.
BROOKS LANDON
Foreword by a Man of Letters
IT WAS MY PRIVILEGE to know the late Jack Crabb-frontiersman, Indian scout, gunfighter, buffalo hunter, adopted Cheyenne-in his final days upon this earth. An account of my association with this remarkable individual may not be out of order here, for there is good reason to believe that without my so to speak catalytic function these extraordinary memoirs would never have seen the light of day. This apparently immodest statement will, I trust, be justified by the ensuing paragraphs.
In the autumn of 1952, following an operation to correct a deviated right septum of the nose, I convalesced in my home under the care of a middle-aged practical nurse named Mrs. Winifred Burr. Mrs. Burr was a widow, and since she has by now herself passed away (as a result of an unfortunate accident involving her Plymouth and a beer truck), she will not be hurt by my description of her as stout, over-curious, and spiteful. She was also incredibly strong and, though I am a man of some bulk, when washing me tumbled me about as if I were an infant.
I might add here, in acknowledgment of the current fashion in literary confession, that from this treatment I derived no sexual excitement whatever. I dreaded those ablutions and used every feasible device to gain my freedom from them. Alas! To no avail. I believe she was trying to provoke me to discharge her-a self-damaging enterprise, since nursing was her livelihood. But Mrs. Burr was one of those people who indulge their moral code as a drunkard does his thirst. Her late husband had been an engineer of freight trains for thirty years, and hence her idea of an adult male American was a person who wore sooty coveralls and a long-billed cap made of striped pillow ticking.
She did not think my physical disrepair serious enough to require a nurse (although my nose was swollen and both eyes black). She disapproved of my means of life-a modest allowance from my father, who was well-to-do, afforded me an opportunity to pursue my literary and historical interests with relative indifference to, and immunity from, the workaday world, for which, notwithstanding, I have the greatest respect. And, as one might expect from a widow, she took a dim view of my bachelorhood at the age of fifty-two, and went so far as to let drop certain nasty implications (which were altogether unjustified: I was once married; I have numerous lady friends, several of whom came to call during my period of incapacity; and I do not own a silk dressing gown).
Mrs. Burr gave me many an unpleasant hour, and it might seem strange that I let her figure so largely in the limited space of this preface, the purpose of which is to introduce a major document of the American frontier and then retire to my habitual obscurity. Well, as so often happens in the affairs of men, fate uses as its instrument such an otherwise unrewarding person as my quondam nurse to further its inscrutable aims.
Between her attacks on me with the washrag and her preparations of the weak tea, toast, and chicken broth that constituted my sustenance during this period, Mrs. Burr was driven by her insatiable curiosity to poke around the apartment like a common burglar. In the bedroom, she operated under the guise of her merciful profession. “Got to get some clean puhjommas on yuh,” she would say, and deaf to my instructions, would proceed to ransack every drawer in the bureau. Once beyond sight, however, she pretended to no vestige of decency, and from my bed I could hear her assault, one by one, the various enclosures throughout the other rooms, desks, cabinets, and chests-many of them quite valuable examples of Spanish-colonial craftsmanship which I procured during my years in northern New Mexico, where I had gone to strengthen my weak lungs on high-altitude air.
It was when I heard her slide back one of the glass doors of the case containing my beloved collection of Indian relics that I was forced to protest, even if the vibration of a shout did make my poor nose throb in pain.
“Mrs. Burr! I must insist that you let my Indian things alone!” cried I.
She shortly appeared in the door of the bedroom, wearing a magnificent Sioux headdress, reputedly the war bonnet of the great Crazy Horse himself, for which I paid a dealer six hundred and fifty dollars some years ago. I was too agitated at the moment to appreciate the sheer visual ludicrousness of this fat woman under that splendid crest. I was too shocked by her heresy. Among the Indians, eagle feathers belonged exclusively to the braves, and a squaw would no more wear a war bonnet, even in jest, than a modern woman would climb into her husband’s athletic supporter. Readers will pardon the uncouth comparison; yet it is not unjustified, for there are few lengths to which our women will not go (the pun is intended), and what Mrs. Burr was actually doing, albeit unwittingly, was to dramatize the malaise of our white culture.
She whooped and performed a crude war dance in the doorway. That person’s energy was astonishing. I dared not protest further, for fear she might take offense and damage the rare headdress, which was almost a century old; already some of the eagle down had been shaken loose and floated about like the seed-carrying parachutes of that woodland plant which bursts to perpetuate its race.
By remaining silent and averting my eyes, I discovered the way to survive Mrs. Burr’s bad taste. Failing to elicit another sound from me, she at last replaced Crazy Horse’s bonnet in the cabinet and came back to the bedroom in what with her passed as a reflective mood.
She seated herself heavily on the radiator cover. “Did I ever tell you when I worked on the staff of the old- folks’ home in Marville?”
A more sensitive person would have taken my murmur as adequate discouragement, but Mrs. Burr was immune to subtlety.
“Seeing them Indin things recalls that to my mind.” She cleared her throat with a disagreeable sound. “There was a dirty old man there, claimed to be a hundred and four years old. I will say he looked every bit of it, I’ll say that for him, nasty old customer, scrawny as a bird and with skin like wornout oilcloth, he couldna been less than ninety even if the other was a dirty lie.”
In trying to reproduce Mrs. Burr’s speech I know I am quixotic: the best I can do is describe it as the vocalization of maximum ill will.
“Anyways, the other thing he claimed to be was a cowboy and Indin-fighter from the olden time. They watch a lot of tellvision up there, old Westerns and such, and he was always saying that’s junk because he went through the real thing. Rotten old bum, used to just ruin it for them other old folk, if they paid him any mind, which they didn’t usually. He had wandering hands, I always used to say, the old devil, and you couldn’t come and tuck the blanket around his ancient legs in the wheelchair without he’d try to get one of them little birdie claws down into your boozum. Say, he had a pinch, too, if you bent over nearby to get a pillow off the floor. Imagine, with a woman of my age, although of course I was younger then, that being seven years ago, and the late Mr. Burr was known to say, when he’d had a few, that I never cut the worst figure. But to get back to the old repperbate at the home, he claimed to be at Custer’s Last Stand, which I happen to know was a durn lie because of having seen a movie of it in which all was killed in some fashion. I always say, the Indin is the only real American when you get right down to it.”
So much for my nurse.
For one thing, as soon as Mrs. Burr saw my interest in the “dirty old man who claimed to be an Indin-fighter,” etc., she led me on a long, squalid, and fruitless chase through the obstacle course of her memory. For another, none of the staff at the institution for the aged at Marville (where I went as soon as my nose had recovered its normal shape) had ever heard of the person in question, whose name Mrs. Burr had rendered as “Papp” or “Stab” or “Tarr.”
Nor did the “cowboy” references ring a bell. And as to the alleged great age of my subject, the physicians laughed in my face; they had never known an inmate to survive past 103. I received the definite impression that
