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4.5
The Wild West is something of an obsessive hobby for effete, psychologically wobbly "man of letters" Ralph Fielding Snell. Despite the disapproval of his father, Snell has the money and leisure "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."Snell serves as a somewhat cracked conduit for the swear-it's-true life story of frontiersman Jack Crabb. Snell encounters Jack in an old folks home, for which Jack certainly qualifies: He claims to be 111 years old and recounts several of those years to Snell before reaching "the end of his trail."Jack's recollections begin in the 1850s when he is separated from his family of would-be Mormons at the age of 10. A meeting for friendly drinks on the prairie with a band of Cheyenne goes horribly wrong. Neither whites nor Indians prove capable of holding their spirits. In fact, by the end of the party, the white men's spirits have taken flight from the corporeal world altogether, leaving physical bodies skewered and cleft.The women decide to turn back to the protection of Fort Laramie, but Jack's mannish, whip-wielding sister, Caroline, announces that she and Jack will take up with the Cheyenne, surprising the Indians as much as her little brother. "It's useless to speculate about what she thought she knew or what she imagined, because they was always all mixed together."When Caroline realizes a life of exotic romance is not in store (in fact, the Indians are shocked to discover she's female), she steals a pony and sneaks off, leaving Jack with the tribe. "My own position turned out to be orphan attached to the chief's lodge, which gave me the right to benevolent consideration from the whole family just as if I was related to them by blood. ... The women were obliged to give me clothes and food, and the men to see I grew up into a man." The Cheyenne, led by Old Lodge Skins, teach Jack "the way of the Human Beings."Jack, though still a boy and small in stature, comes off pretty manly during a horse-thieving skirmish against a rival band of Crow, so Old Lodge Skins renames Jack "Little Big Man."Despite frequent fatalities, war among the tribes is a relatively good-natured activity, but it's becoming clear that something's going to have to be done about those pesky white people. "The Army didn't fight by the rules and no doubt would not have if they knew them." A grand war council is convened, and plans are made to "rub them out." Jack has little problem with the concept in theory, but when confronted by a saber-waving cavalry charge barreling straight for him, "one big mowing machine with many hundred bright blades that chopped into dust all life before it and spewed it out behind," he can't scrub the warpaint off his face fast enough.So begins Jack's reversion to white man status. He's adopted by the Rev. Silas Pendrake and subjected to the civilizing influence of church, school, female duplicity, sexual hangups and pneumonia. "I believed my blood was getting watery from the lack of raw buffalo liver. The only thing I learned so far that seemed to take real root was lustful yearnings, and the Reverend told me they was wrong."Jack finds that his years living among Human Beings have made him ill-equipped for city life. He runs away to the grubby gold-prospecting encampment that's growing into what will become Denver. He's more comfortable among the mule skinners trading there, but when they're set upon by his former brethren of the Cheyenne, he's quick to assert his affinity for the Indians. Although Old Lodge Skins welcomes him back, Jack has become too familiar with white man's progress to believe the Cheyenne way will last. The whites have dug in, and they're not going anyplace. "I never heard of a natural force that would tear cellar walls from the earth." He advises his foster family to head north and stay away from the whites.Jack won't be going with them. "I had been doing right well in Denver. I had got onto the idea of ambition. You can't make anything of yourself in the white world unless you grasp that concept. But there isn't even a way to express the idea in Cheyenne."After the Civil War, the U.S. government is able to devote its undivided attention to eradicating the Indians. In turn, the Cheyenne hook up with the Sioux and Arapaho to terrorize white settlements. In the tit-for-tat hostilities, Jack loses a white wife and child and gains an Indian replacement set.Ralph Fielding Snell observes that "Jack Crabb seemed to specialize in the art or craft of coincidence." Jack is always perfectly positioned in front-row seats for the major events in Western history, personally interacting with the major players. He works the Colorado gold rush, witnesses the cross-country extension of the Union Pacific, takes part in the extinction of the buffalo. He meets Wild Bill Hickock, Wyatt Earp and the luciferian-nicknamed Son of the Morning Star, George Armstrong Custer. The arrogant cavalry general provides a white counterpoint to Old Lodge Skins as the father figure who has the biggest impact on Jack.Jack is a man perpetually straddling a spiritual border: Among whites, he feels Indian; among Indians, he sees himself as "white to the core." And generally, he has the bad timing to be on whichever side is losing at the moment.All this vacillation between societies might make Jack appear unsympathetic as a character, a man without strong loyalties. As soon as his life is threatened, he switches persona, abandoning friends, family and lovers. It's a device by which author Thomas Berger can show both sides of the conflict. Jack encounters very few clear-cut good guys or bad guys in the white population centers. The Indians are neither the nobles of James Fenimore Cooper's novels nor the savages of George Armstrong Custer's prejudices. All of them are part of the same cast of fools myopically clawing for meatier parts in the epic tragicomedy of Western expansion. The Cheyenne refer to themselves as Human Beings to assert their superiority over others, but their actions throughout the book are just as likely to live down as live up to that term. Even Custer, the closest thing the book has to a villain, is portrayed as more of a preening fool and an egotistical loon.Lest the historians complain, Berger makes it clear that Jack Crabb is quite likely full of beans (and keep in mind the additional filter of Ralph Fielding Snell). Jack is spinning a yarn in which the facts don't stand a chance against the truth. "Little Big Man" is what would generally be referred to as a "revisionist" western, though that can be a term by which critics reveal their ignorance of the genre, and it tends to belittle and downplay the mature groundwork laid by practitioners of that genre before the serious literary types came along to play. Revisionist westerns seldom revise as much as they think they do, but the best of them reside comfortably alongside the classics. OF the genre, not outside it or above it or, worst of all, transcending it."Little Big Man" is a damn fine western. It's also a damn fine piece of literature if you're one of those insecure Yankee types.
