Remarks, Bill Nye [android pdf ebook reader txt] 📗
- Author: Bill Nye
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Where are the proud chieftains of my tribe? Where are Old Weasel Asleep and Orlando the Hie Jacet Promoter? Where are Prickly Ash Berry and The Avenging Wart? Where are The Roman-nosed Pelican and Goggle-eyed Aleck, The-man-who-rides-the-blizzard-bareback?
They are extremely gone. They are extensively whence. Ole Blackhawk, in whose veins flows the blood of many chiefs, is sawing wood for the Belle of the West deadfall for the whiskey. He once rode the war pony into the fray and buried his tomahawk in the phrenology of his foe. Now he straddles the saw-buck and yanks the woodsaw athwart the bosom of the basswood chunk.
My people once owned this broad land; but the Pilgrim Fathers (where are they?) came and planted the baked bean and the dried apple, and my tribe vamoosed. Once we were a nation. Now we are the tin can tied to the American eagle.
Warriors! This should be a day of jubilee, but how can the man rejoice who has a boil on his nose? How can the chief of a once proud people shoot firecrackers and dance over the graves of his race? How can I be hilarious with the victor, on whose hands are the blood of my children?
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.
At Sidney I put on my revolver and went into the eating house to get my dinner. A tall man met me at the door and threw me about forty feet in an oblique manner. I asked him if he meant anything personal by that and he said not at all, not at all. I then asked him if he would not allow me to eat my dinner and he said that depended on what I wanted for my dinner. If I would lay down my arms and come back to the reservation and remain neutral to the Government and eat cooked food, it would be all right, but if I insisted on eating raw dining-room girls and scalloped young ladies, he would bar me out.
We landed at Chi-eene in the evening. They had hacks and 'busses and carriages till you couldn't rest, all standing there at the depot, and a large colored man in a loud tone of voice remarked: “INTEROCEAN HO-TEL!!!!”
{Illustration: A REAL COWBOY.}
I went there myself. It had doors and windows to it, and carpets and gas. The young man who showed me to my room was very polite to me. He seemed to want to get acquainted. He said:
“You are from New Hampshire, are you not?”
I told him not to give it away, but I was from New Hampshire. Then I asked him how he knew.
He said that several New Hampshire people had been out there that summer, and they had worn the same style of revolver and generally had one thumb done up in a rag. Then he said that if I came from New Hampshire he would show me how to turn off the gas.
He also took my revolver down to the office with him and put it in the safe, because he said someone might get into my room in the night and kill me with it if he left it here. He was a perfect gentleman.
They have a big opera house there in Chi-eene, and while I was there they had the Eyetalian opera singers, Patty and Nevady there. The streets were lit up with electricity, and people seemed to kind of politely look down on me, I thought. Still, they acted as if they tried not to notice my clothes and dime museum hat.
They seemed to look at me as if I wasn't to blame for it, and as if they felt sorry for me. If I'd had my United States clothes with me, I could have had a good deal of fun in Chi-eene, going to the opera and the lectures, and concerts, et cetera. But finally I decided to return, so I wrote to my parents how I
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