If we had known more of the white man, we would have made it red hot for
him four hundred years ago when he came to our coast. We fed him and
clothed him as a white-skinned curiosity then, but we didn't know there
were so many of him. All he wanted then was a little smoking tobacco and
love. Now he feeds us on antique pork, and borrows our annuities to build
a Queen Anne wigwam with a furnace in the bottom and a piano in the top.
Warriors! My words are few. Tears are idle and unavailing. If I had
scalding tears enough for a mill site, I would not shed a blamed one. The
warrior suffers, but he never squeals. He accepts the position and says
nothing. He wraps his royal horse blanket around his Gothic bones and is
silent.
But the pale face cannot tickle us with a barley straw on the Fourth of
July and make us laugh. You can kill the red man, but you cannot make him
hilarious over his own funeral. These are the words of truth, and my
warriors will do well to paste them in their plug hats for future
reference.
The Holy Terror.
While in New England trying in my poor, weak way to represent the “rowdy
west,” I met a sad young man who asked me if I lived in Chi-eene. I told
him that if he referred to Cheyenne, I had been there off and on a good
deal.
He said he was there not long ago, but did not remain. He bought some
clothes in Chicago, so that he could appear in Chi-eene as a “holy terror”
when he landed there, and thus in a whole town of “holy terrors” he would
not attract attention.
I am not, said he, by birth or instinct, a holy terror, but I thought I
would like to try it a little while, anyhow. I got one of those Chicago
sombreros with a gilt fried cake twisted around it for a band. Then I got
a yellow silk handkerchief on the ten cent counter to tie around my neck.
Then I got a suit of smoke-tanned buckskin clothes and a pair of
moccasins. I had never seen a bad, bad man from Chi-eene, but I had seen
pictures of them and they all wore moccasins. The money that I had left I
put into a large revolver and a butcher knife with a red Morocco sheath to
it. The revolver was too heavy for me to hold in one hand and shoot, but
by resting it on a fence I could kill a cow easy enough if she wasn't too
blamed restless.
I went out to the stock yards in Chicago one afternoon and practiced with
my revolver. One of my thumbs is out there at the stock yards now.
At Omaha I put on my new suit and sent my human clothes home to my father.
He told me when I came away that when I got out to Wyoming, probably I
wouldn't want to attract attention by wearing clothes, and so I could send
my clothes back to him and he would be glad to have them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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