I mean I did that once, and I was promptly shot through the shoulder from behind, by a man I never saw. It was in Dodge City, and I never did find out who done it. That was the most hateful town on the face of the earth. Everybody there hated everyone else, buffalo hunters hated mule skinners, both hated cowboys, gamblers hated anyone who played against them, and all joined in detestation of the soldiers from the fort nearby.

All you had to do to make an enemy in Dodge was to be seen by another human being: he immediately loathed your guts. Look into the sky and predict rain, and you could get a fight out of it. So when I got it in the back, I was not surprised. He was a bad shot, incidentally, for the slug missed the bone. After six or eight months the stiffness was gone except when it rained. By that time I had left Dodge, though, and I didn’t try very hard to determine the identity of the near-assassin. I would only have been interested could I have got enough dynamite to blow the whole place sky-high. For I was no exception to the rule: I hated everyone there.

My last buffalo-hunting season was the winter of 1874-75, and we spent a good deal more time looking for herds than shooting them. I cleared only about $350 from fall to spring-to give you an idea of how slim was the pickings. Then, not long after I got the skins into Dodge, I was shot in the back as aforesaid.

I headed north when I was fit to travel and went all the way to Wyoming without seeing a wild Indian. Instead, I run across plenty of homesteaders, who built themselves houses out of sod and planted wheat and corn, and they was real friendly and sometimes had young daughters they wanted to marry off, so I was well received and they shared with me what food they had-which come in right handy, for you didn’t see no game any more on the central plains.

It was nicer inside them houses than you would have thought, for the ladies tied cloth against the ceiling to catch the dust that fell, and the sod was so thick that it would endure a rainstorm without letting in a drop. The trouble come next day when the water at last penetrated; then it and mud dripped down for most a week. Of course, it rained very seldom-which was good for the houses, but death on crops. And then the summer of ’74 billions of grasshoppers descended on the plains in a great blanket stretching from Arkansas to Canada, and ate up not only what grew in the fields but also harness and covered-wagon tops and a Union Pacific train was stalled at Kearney, Nebraska, by a three-foot drift of them insects. When the grasshoppers left, after two weeks, it was as if nothing had yet been planted, all being gnawed right down to the ground. Now I have mentioned how difficult it often was for an Indian to get his three squares a day, but there was also considerable risk to being a white homesteader, at least in them days.

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.”