satisfaction.
The obsequies were held on June 25, 1953, which happened to be the seventy-seventh anniversary of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. In death as in life, Jack Crabb seemed to specialize in the art or craft of coincidence.
As to the text: it is faithful to Mr. Crabb’s narration as transcribed literally from the tapes. I have subtracted nothing, and added only the necessary marks of punctuation: when the latter sometimes seem sparse, my motive has been to indicate the breathless rush in which these passages emerged from the speaker. I have made no attempt to reproduce the old scout’s peculiar voice or pronunciation, lest the entire book resemble the letter which he wrote me from Marville.
He was a gifted raconteur and had a keen ear: in no other fashion can I account for certain inconsistencies. You will notice that while the direct narration,
You may question Mr. Crabb’s having in his untutored vocabulary such a word as “apprehension.” But it must be remembered that the frontiersman of yore received his rude culture from many sources: for example, Shakespearean troupes traveled to the farthest outposts; as did ministers of the gospel, with the King James Bible in their saddlebags. Then as we shall read, under Mrs. Pendrake’s tutelage young Jack was exposed to Alexander Pope and no doubt other notable poets as well.
I think you will agree that Mr. Crabb is astonishingly circumspect as to language. Occasional uncouthness, yes. Consider the man, his circumstances and time. But his attitude towards women has an old-fashioned gallantry to it: romantic, sentimental-to be honest, I think it even cloying at times. He may have overdrawn his portrait of Mrs. Pendrake, for example. I suspect she may have been no more than the trollop each of us has encountered now and again in his own passage through life. My own ex-wife, say-but this is Mr. Crabb’s book and not mine.
However, when not giving direct dictation, Jack Crabb, man to man, was probably the foulest-mouthed individual of whom I have ever had experience. He was incapable of speaking one entire sentence that could be uttered word for word from a public platform or quoted in a newspaper. It was “Hand me the _______ microphone, son.… I wonder when that _______ nurse is bringing the _______ lunch.” So I must ask the reader to make his own substitutions when in the course of the narrative Mr. Crabb represents himself as saying to Wyatt Earp, in that famous confrontation down on the buffalo range: “Draw, you goddam Belch, you.” Be assured the idiom was far stronger.
One more note: the word “arse.” Like so many amateur writers-and he thought of his spoken narrative as eventually appearing in letterpress-Mr. Crabb was frequently threatened with loftiness, but this is not a sample of it. No, he believed this term to be the polite locution for the derriere, that which could be pronounced anywhere without offending. You will notice he often puts the other form into the speech of those he regards as particularly boorish.
So much for that. A decade has passed since Jack Crabb spoke into my machine. In the interim my father at last died of natural causes, and thus began a protracted legal battle over the inheritance between myself and an alleged half-brother, illegitimate, who appeared from nowhere. Which should not concern us here, were it not that I subsequently suffered an emotional collapse that rendered me
I have said enough, and now shall relinquish the stage to Jack Crabb. I shall pop back in the briefest Epilogue. But first you must read this remarkable story!
RALPH FIELDING SNELL
CHAPTER 1 A Terrible Mistake
I AM A WHITE MAN and never forgot it, but I was brought up by the Cheyenne Indians from the age of ten.
My Pa had been a minister of the gospel in Evansville, Indiana. He didn’t have a regular church, but managed to talk some saloonkeeper into letting him use his place of a Sunday morning for services. This saloon was down by the riverfront and the kind of people would come in there was Ohio River boatmen, Hoosier fourflushers on their way to New Orleans, pickpockets, bullyboys, whores, and suchlike, my Pa’s favorite type of congregation owing to the possibilities it afforded for the improvement of a number of mean skunks.
The first time he come into the saloon and started to preach, that bunch was fixing to lynch him, but he climbed on top of the bar and started to yell and in a minute or two they all shut up and listened. My Pa could handle with his voice any white man that ever lived, though he was only of the middle height and skinny as a pick handle. What he’d do, you see, was to make a person feel guilty of something they never thought of. Distraction was his game. He’d stare with his blazing eyes at some big, rough devil off the boats and shout: “How long’s it been you ain’t seen your old Ma?” Like as not that fellow would scrape his feet and honk his nose in his sleeve, and when my brothers and sisters carried around cleaned-out spittoons for the collection, remember us kindly for our pains.
Pa split the collection with the saloonkeeper, which was part of the reason he was let to use the place. The other part was that the bar stayed open throughout the service. My Pa wasn’t no Puritan. He’d take a shot or three himself right while he was preaching, and was never known to say a word against the drink, or women, or cards, or any of the pleasures. “Every kind of sport has been invented by the Lord and therefore can’t be bad in itself,” he would say. “It’s only bad when the pursuit of it makes a man into a mean skunk who will cuss and spit and chew and never wash his face.” These were the only specific sins I ever heard my Pa mention. He never minded a cigar, but was dead set against chewing tobacco, foul language, and dirt on a person. So long as a man was clean, my Pa didn’t care whether he drank himself to death, gambled away every cent so that his kids starved, or got sick from frequenting low women.
I never suspected it at that time, being just a young boy, but I realize now that my Pa was a lunatic. Whenever he wasn’t raving he would fall into the dumps and barely answer when he was spoke to, and at his meals he was single-minded as an animal in filling his belly. Before he got religion he was a barber, and even afterward he cut the hair of us kids, and I tell you if the spirit come over him at such a time it was indeed a scaring experience: he would holler and jump and like as not take a piece of your neck flesh with his scissor just as soon as he would hair.
My Pa was making out right well in that saloon-although it is true there was a movement afoot among the regular preachers to run him out of town because he was stealing their congregations aside from them middle- aged women who prefer the ordinary kind of Christianity that forbids everything-when he suddenly decided he ought to go to Utah and become a Mormon. Among other things he liked the Mormon idea that a man is entitled to a number of wives. The point is that other than cussing, chewing, etc., my Pa was all for freedom of every type. He wasn’t interested himself in having an additional wife, but liked the principle. That’s why my Ma didn’t mind. She was a tiny little woman with a round, innocent face faintly freckled, and when Pa got too excited on a day when he wasn’t going to preach and work off his steam, she would make him undress and sit in a barrel-half and would scrub his back with a brush, which calmed him down after about fifteen minutes.
Pa took us all to Independence, Missouri, where he bought a wagon and team of ox, and we set out on the California Trail. That was near as I can figure the spring of 1852, but we still run into a number of poor devils going out on the arse-end of the gold rush that started in ’48. Before long we had accumulated a train of seven wagon and two horse, and the others had elected Pa as leader, though he didn’t know no more about crossing the plains than I do about the lingo of the heathen Chinese who in later years was to work sixteen hours a day building the Central Pacific Railroad. But given to shouting the way he was, I think they figured since they couldn’t shut him
