fighting gal mighty to their taste. I have had a good many admirers every place I have went, including, if you’d like to know, Mr. Wild Bill Hickok, of who I reckon you have heerd, only that whore you mention tried to steal him away from me. Now I’ll tell you, what people recall about her is that name, it ain’t her personal self, and ‘Calamity’ ain’t her real name nohow, which is Jane Canary, but just let a bunch in some saloon hear ‘Calam,’ and they don’t care who it is, they’ll joke you and buy you drinks and you are real popular. I’ve had some hard luck in my time, Jack, and I don’t mind being the center of a bunch of fun-loving fellows.”
There was something real pathetic about Caroline. But I knowed what she meant about names: it was certainly true. Take me, and look at the colorful, dangerous life I have led in participating in some of the most remarkable events of the history of this country. I’ll wager to say you never heard of me before now. Then think of Wild Bill Hickok, George Armstrong Custer, Wyatt Earp-names is what they had. Wild Jack Crabb, Crabb’s Last Stand-it just don’t sound the same.
But of course right at that moment I wasn’t thinking of that, but rather about my erstwhile acquaintance Hickok, a remarkable coincidence.
“Wild Bill?” says I. “He is here in Cheyenne?” For I had not seen him since K.C. though having heard much of his renown in the years intervening.
But while she showed no particular sign on her own mention of the name, as soon as I said it Caroline commenced to sniffle and sob and abuse that man and I couldn’t get no more out of her that was coherent on the subject, and did not understand the situation until the next day as I was walking down the main street of Cheyenne, who should step out of a drygoods store but Hickok himself.
He had put on a few pounds since I seen him last and was getting jowly; still wore his hair long, and was attired in his fancy town clothes of frock coat and all. He carried several boxes, of course under his left arm, and his eyes, which had seemed to get smaller owing to the fatness of his face, flickered up one side of the street and down the next.
I says, slow and easy: “Hiya, Bill. Remember me?”
He give me an equally slow once-over. I reckon he knowed me well enough right off, but had to check first as to whether I was about to pull a hideout weapon on him.
Then he says: “How are you, hoss? Still playing poker?”
I says not as much as in the old days, for I was fixing to go for gold.
So was he, he says, and instantly suggested that maybe we could go together. So we went to a saloon to drink on it, and that was when he says: “But first I am getting married.”
Now, I realized that it was not to Caroline, and that was her trouble.
“To Calamity Jane?” I asks.
Hickok looked at me real funny. “Some people say,” he allowed, “that Jane and I are already man and wife and had a baby daughter. But not,” he added, “to my face.”
I note this part of the conversation for what it is worth in historical interest.
“No,” says he. “I am getting married to Mrs. Agnes Lake Thatcher, who is the widow of the celebrated showman William Lake Thatcher, now deceased. Agnes was formerly an equestrienne with the circus, riding standing up on the bare back of a white horse, prettiest thing you ever saw. A remarkable woman, hoss. I saw her perform some years ago in the state of New York, when I was traveling with my own show.”
Now that was a phase of Hickok’s career of which I had not heard.
“Oh yes,” he says. “It was at Niagara Falls. I had a herd of buffalo, a cinnamon bear, and a band of Comanches. But the animals got loose and charged the audience, and the Indians had a real hunt on their hands before things settled down. It was a mess and I had to sell the buffalo to get fare back home.”
“Speaking of Indians,” I says, “I understand the Sioux don’t like miners going into the Black Hills.”
Bill disposed of that with a wave of his left hand. “Don’t worry about it,” he says. “The Army’s going out to round them up.”
“The miners?” I asks.
He looks impatient. “No, the Indians. You can’t stop white men from going where they will. I happen to have heard,” he said in a low voice, “that Grant sent out a secret order to the Army not to stop any more miners from entering the Hills. Instead, they are mounting a campaign against the hostiles in the Powder River country.”
Mention of the Powder River give me an unpleasant feeling, which I don’t believe I must explain if you have listened to my many references to that favorite area of Old Lodge Skins’s.
“Led by George Armstrong Custer, no doubt,” I says.
Hickok replies: “You are out of touch, hoss. Don’t you know about the Congressional hearings?”
Well, I did not, being only a now-and-again reader of the newspapers, and considering politics to be a marvelous bore. It was only by accident that in later years I saw that notice about Amelia’s husband.
For that matter, when I was acquainted with Wild Bill in Kansas City, neither did he take any interest in public affairs; so this new attitude of his must have been connected with getting married. You recall when me and Olga was hitched was the same period in which I participated in the public life of Denver.
Anyway, Bill told me there was a stink about the Army post traders in which Orvil Grant, the President’s brother, was involved. Nobody else but authorized traders could sell anything on a military reservation, so naturally these fellows put no limit on their prices and was gouging the troops. They was also getting ahold of supplies that was supposed to go to the reservation Indians under treaty obligations and selling them to soldiers and civilians. Orvil Grant was believed to be illegally selling traderships to the highest bidder, using his brother’s pull. Belknap, the Secretary of War, was in back of all this, etc., etc.
“Oh, is that all?” says I when Bill had apprised me, for to tell you the truth I thought all this was perfectly normal, having never known a case among white men where the fellows with authority and connections did not make the most of it. I think a good case could be made for the modesty of Orvil Grant’s operations, considering whose kin he was.
“Well,” Bill says, slightly irritated, “you asked about Custer. That’s why he isn’t going out after the Sioux: he went to Washington to testify in the hearings.”
Now to show you how limited my idea of Custer was, I says: “Wants to get himself in good with the President.”
Hickok shook his head. “You stick to poker, hoss,” he says. “Politics is too much for you. Custer’s going to testify
“What’s Custer want to do that for?”
And Wild Bill says: “Because he always does what he thinks is right. There are a lot of people who hate his guts, but there isn’t anybody who can say that he doesn’t back up what he believes in.”
Then Hickok returned to the subject of getting married. “Agnes,” he says, “is a fine lady, and not to be confused with the kind of women you and me knew in K.C. That’s the reason why I have decided to go for gold and become rich. I hear you can pick it off the ground, practically.” He ordered another round of drinks and we got to talking over what gear we’d need and whether we should take in other partners, for we was sure enough going as soon as he got hitched and come back from his honeymoon which he and the Mrs. was going to take back East in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Wild Bill had sure changed. In K.C. I could swear he never knowed the name of the President, let alone the ins and outs of politics he now spouted. Nor do I think he really cared about money in the old days. Obviously it was this woman of his that had made him more of a normal human being. I noticed he was learning to use his right hand occasionally to drink with, and he wasn’t nearly so nervous about the other customers of the saloon; nor did he jump when I went into my vest pocket for a dollar.
I don’t mean he was turning to butter. As a matter of fact, a day or so later he killed a man who drew on him in front of a livery stable. But there wasn’t no question of his being under less pressure, or maybe in view of what he was going to do before the summer was out, just another kind.
I certainly didn’t bother the man none about my sister Caroline, so I don’t know to this day whether her romance with him was purely imaginary or had a basis, for I’ll tell you something about that gal: she was losing her mind, poor thing. I should have seen it coming years back. Now that I thought of it, I remembered that everything I had ever heard about her unhappy love affairs come from her alone. It was right likely that Frank Delight, for example, never had asked her to marry him.
The point was that while Caroline survived them romantic disasters in her earlier years, she wasn’t getting any younger. Indeed, she was forty-four if she was a day, and hadn’t so far as I knowed ever got married yet,
