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Page 19
"Education, man," I said, "is the watchword. In time they will rise to
our standard of civilization. Look at what education has done for the
Indian."
"O-ho!" sang Jeff, lighting his pipe (which was a good sign). "Yes, the
Indian! I'm looking. I hasten to contemplate the redman as a standard
bearer of progress. He's the same as the other brown boys. You can't
make an Anglo-Saxon of him. Did I ever tell you about the time my friend
John Tom Little Bear bit off the right ear of the arts of culture and
education and spun the teetotum back round to where it was when Columbus
was a little boy? I did not?
"John Tom Little Bear was an educated Cherokee Indian and an old friend
of mine when I was in the Territories. He was a graduate of one of them
Eastern football colleges that have been so successful in teaching the
Indian to use the gridiron instead of burning his victims at the stake.
As an Anglo-Saxon, John Tom was copper-colored in spots. As an Indian,
he was one of the whitest men I ever knew. As a Cherokee, he was a
gentleman on the first ballot. As a ward of the nation, he was mighty
hard to carry at the primaries.
"John Tom and me got together and began to make medicine--how to get up
some lawful, genteel swindle which we might work in a quiet way so as
not to excite the stupidity of the police or the cupidity of the larger
corporations. We had close upon $500 between us, and we pined to make it
grow, as all respectable capitalists do.
"So we figured out a proposition which seems to be as honorable as a
gold mine prospectus and as profitable as a church raffle. And inside of
thirty days you find us swarming into Kansas with a pair of fluent
horses and a red camping wagon on the European plan. John Tom is Chief
Wish-Heap-Dough, the famous Indian medicine man and Samaritan Sachem of
the Seven Tribes. Mr. Peters is business manager and half owner. We
needed a third man, so we looked around and found J. Conyngham Binkly
leaning against the want column of a newspaper. This Binkly has a
disease for Shakespearian roles, and an hallucination about a 200
nights' run on the New York stage. But he confesses that he never could
earn the butter to spread on his William S. roles, so he is willing to
drop to the ordinary baker's kind, and be satisfied with a 200-mile run
behind the medicine ponies. Besides Richard III, he could do
twenty-seven coon songs and banjo specialties, and was willing to cook,
and curry the horses. We carried a fine line of excuses for taking
money. One was a magic soap for removing grease spots and quarters from
clothes. One was a Sum-wah-tah, the great Indian Remedy made from a
prairie herb revealed by the Great Spirit in a dream to his favorite
medicine men, the great chiefs McGarrity and Siberstein, bottlers,
Chicago. And the other was a frivolous system of pick-pocketing the
Kansasters that had the department stores reduced to a decimal fraction.
Look ye! A pair of silk garters, a dream book, one dozen clothespins, a
gold tooth, and `When Knighthood Was in Flower' all wrapped up in a
genuine Japanese silkarina handkerchief and handed to the handsome lady
by Mr. Peters for the trivial sum of fifty cents, while Professor Binkly
entertains us in a three-minute round with the banjo.
"'Twas an eminent graft we had. We ravaged peacefully through the State,
determined to remove all doubt as to why 'twas called bleeding Kansas.
John Tom Little Bear, in full Indian chief's costume, drew crowds away
from the parchesi sociables and government ownership conversaziones.
While at the football college in the East he had acquired quantities of
rhetoric and the art of calisthenics and sophistry in his classes, and
when he stood up in the red wagon and explained to the farmers,
eloquent, about chilblains and hyperaesthesia of the cranium, Jeff
couldn't hand out the Indian Remedy fast enough for 'em.
"One night we was camped on the edge of a little town out west of
Salina. We always camped near a stream, and put up a little tent.
Sometimes we sold out of the Remedy unexpected, and then Chief
Wish-Heap-Dough would have a dream in which the Manitou commanded him to
fill up a few bottles of Sum-wah-tah at the most convenient place. 'Twas
about ten o'clock, and we'd just got in from a street performance. I was
in the tent with the lantern, figuring up the day's profits. John Tom
hadn't taken off his Indian make-up, and was sitting by the campfire
minding a fine sirloin steak in the pan for the Professor till he
finished his hair-raising scene with the trained horses.
"All at once out of dark bushes comes a pop like a firecracker, and John
Tom gives a grunt and digs out of his bosom a little bullet that has
dented itself against his collar-bone. John Tom makes a dive in the
direction of the fireworks, and comes back dragging by the collar a kid
about nine or ten years young, in a velveteen suit, with a little
nickel-mounted rifle in his hand about as big as a fountain-pen.
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