From Book 2 of The Sacred Clown’s Modern West Trilogy, Sitting Bull’s Mutual Funds
Clowns, Custer, and the Ghost Dance
“Everyone needs a little turn around money.” ~ The Clown
Sitting Bull’s train left Grand Central Station in the early morning hours bound for Chicago. After the train cleared the city, the rhythm of the tracks had him dreaming. Clouds and chunks alternated in his brain as he nodded along. Buffalo Bill came to him as a friend who pretended to understand his plight. But when push came to shove, Bill was less true than a dime-store poster. A cad. His ears still rung and his stomach ached after overhearing Bill’s midnight slobbering protestations of love for Annie Oakley.
“Annie loves me and only me!” Bill had roared alone in his room, his voice cracking like a broken keg light. Old Bull thought that was curious since Annie had been his catch. He’d shared a stage with her in Minneapolis the year before.
Annie’s performance was electrifying. Her gleaming blue eyes, her erect posture, her calm presence as she steadied her Winchester—those jeans were a prelude to her bullets slicing five consecutive playing cards in half from fifty feet. It was too much for one man to stand, much less Sitting Bull. On the spot, he named her Little Sure Shot and gave her the very moccasins he’d worn at the Battle of Greasy Grass. If only he’d enlisted her services with a rifle before that fight, Custer and his men would’ve gone down sooner.
His dream sped up. Soon he saw that Buffalo Bill and Custer were both megalomaniacs. Maybe he shouldn’t have introduced Annie to Bill. He could’ve looked the other way when Bill howled her name in the night. Was introducing Bill to Annie a mistake? Was he too protective of her? Should he have looked the other way or at least stuck his fingers in his ears when Bill went howling her name in the night? Just as well, he dreamed. There was more important buffalo fat in the fire. The rumors of the Ghost Dance reached him at nearly the same time as Bill’s loud claims of love in the wee hours.
The dance had spread from the South. Some said it started way down in South America. It was a ray of hope in a desolate landscape, carrying the promise that the whites, wasichus, would disappear. In their place the great buffalo herds would reappear along with the ghosts of all native ancestors. They’d soon be gone when he woke, and the good life would return for all believers. He needed to know more. He needed to do more. He’d been gone too long making that loser Bill more mazaska. Fuck him. A tear formed in his eye as he thought about leaving Annie behind, but she was a strong woman. She’d be OK.
Old Bull’s reverie was punctured when the train got to the train station in Buffalo. The train screeched to a halt the door flew open to the frigid air and a ghastly white man speeding down the aisle. “Sitting Bull, Sitting Bull! I recognize your picture from the Wild West Show! It’s so good to see you in person!” The Old Bull had met many a well-wisher their fake adulation. He could spot a huckster a prairie mile away. His type would never make it on the reservation.
“What do you really want?”
“I bring you tidings from my boss, Doheny Rockwell. You’ve heard of him?”
“No and I don’t care. I’m on my way back home to my forced home, Standing Rock. You look like death, almost like you’ve been eating spoiled rations in an agency town supplied by a thieving Indian agent. Back home we’d say that you’re five steps away from being a ghost.”
“I’m most aware of my appearance, unfortunately, but thank you anyway. That aside, I want to make you a small financial proposition. If you turn around and come back to Connecticut with me to meet Mr. Rockwell and learn of his offer, I can give you one thousand dollars.”
Sitting Bull had sold photographs of his likeness all over the Midwest for a dollar a pop. What he hadn’t given away as gifts to his clan in his infrequent visits back to Standing Rock, he’d saved. Along with the scrip that Buffalo Bill had given him, he now had more assets than ever before in his life. He could be bold.
“Five thousand dollars.”
“That isn’t unreasonable, kind sir. Consider it done.”
A Mansion of Promises and Poison
“Palaces echo with hungry ghosts and rubber fortunes. Watch your step, Old Bull—every handshake here is a contract, and every contract is a joke because the house always wins.” ~ The Clown
Sitting Bull wasn’t impressed. He had seen larger mansions. Once he’d been invited as a curiosity to meet the met the Queen in Buckingham Palace. He had called her grandmother and thanked her for letting him hang out in Canada after the Battle of Greasy Grass. She barely acknowledged the jingle dress he gave her. The rows of jingles adorning the garment were made from snuff cans that beat out a sound that healed the sick when set in motion by a skillful dancer. Maybe the queen thought that he regarded all English as sick? Maybe she was miffed because it was four sizes too large for a woman who stood four foot eight. Oh well, he thought, she might make herself a tipi out of it. The temperature in her palace reminded him of the polite but cold smiles and even colder shoulders he’d been accorded by England’s elite.
Baron Rockwell’s estate was a garish imitation of those European palaces, far too large for a bachelor. At 10,000 square feet and 36 rooms, it dwarfed Mark Twain’s home and all the buildings and teepees set up in Fort Yates. Sitting Bull entered the foyer, his contempt palpable.
The air smelled of steaming radiators and fresh bacon. “Welcome to my world, Mister Sitting Bull,” Rockwell said. “Thank you for meeting me. Come in!”
Sitting Bull replied, “Toka [enemy], I am here. What do you want?”
“I need you as my ambassador. My holdings in the Amazon have natives who make rubber for me, but they’re unhappy. You can help.” “Tell me more, forked tongue. I know about rubber. I coat my horses’ hooves with rubber so that my enemies can’t hear me coming. I have heard about forest natives and their good hearts. I also know that Whites use them at every turn. I know nothing about the Amazon.”
“What do you know about mutual funds?”
“Mutual funds? What do you mean Toka? I know that you’re talking about Mazaska, White Man’s money. It’s always poison,” Sitting Bull’s eyes flashed.
“Do you remember how Buffalo Bill last paid you? He didn’t give you coins or dollar bills. He gave you scrip, a promise to pay you later. Mutual funds are like scrip, and they could make you very wealthy.”
“I don’t care about my wealth. I care about my people.”
“Exactly! These mutual funds will be worth heap dollars that you can give them if all goes well in the Amazon and our native friends get made happy.”
“Don’t use cigar stand Indian words like ‘heap’ with me, toka. I won’t stand for it. Literally. Tell your assistant I’m ready to go back to the train. Where’s my five thousand dollars?”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t mean to offend you. Of course, you would be offended by my infelicitous diction. I meant no harm. I need your help and as a token of my honesty, here’s your five thousand dollars.” He handed over a wad of bills.
“That’s more like it. Now tell me more about these mutual funds.”
“They are a godly financial instrument and a promise to share risk. I used them to finance my rubber holdings in the Amazon. I have investors who hold five million dollars in paper that will return them many dollars in the future, but only if all goes well. They’re mostly very stupid people who hope to trade on my good name and money making genius. These rubes are too dumb to know how much money they could lose. But with your help in making the natives happy, we could all come out very well.”
“Why me?”
“Well, sir, you are a celebrity. A worldwide figure. You’re formidable. People want your autograph. They want to take their pictures with you. You know this. You are so famous that even all the natives on my rubber plantation know about you. They’ll treat you like the chief you are.”
“I don’t like your forked words, toka. Sounds like another scheme like Old Bill Cody had to make sheep out of everyone while plucking wool from their skin. Those crowds in London and Munich are still feeling fleeced. He even got Queen Victoria and that bad smelling kraut husband of hers, Albert, to donate mazaska to his Wild West Show.”
“No. No. No. It’s a way of benefiting everyone. We, and I include you in that, could become fabulously wealthy and the natives could get a few tools, clothes to cover their private parts, and some food that we have laying around warehouses on the Amazon River. We’ll build them schools and hospitals. Everything they need to join us a full partner. Everyone wins, especially you and especially me.
Please, Mr. Bull. I know I’m not yet your friend. But I’m not your enemy either. I’m just a man who’s made his bed, and now I lie in it. You think you’re the only one who’s lost something? I lost my soul a long time ago. Don’t miss it much it seems.”
“You certainly did lose your center and now you smell bad. Ómna as we say in Lakota. Do you understand how forest people might be upset? You make money. But they live as slaves.”
“Slaves? Slaves? You call my treatment of them ‘slavery?’ My God, Mr. Bull, they have full agency! They are free men, women, and children! They can leave at any time and vanish back in the rainforest, but they chose to stay, sing songs, and be happy with what they buy at my store. Of course, to be honest, if they do choose to leave, they need to settle their store bills but so far no one has had to do that.”
“You say they’re happy? My families back on Standing Rock aren’t happy. No one wants to be fenced in, be made dependent on eating from someone else’s hand, and to be treated like bae cattle on stolen land.”
“Mister Sitting Bull, I’d like to send you there to see for yourself. To make friends with these forest people and to help them be happier. This will make your and my mutual funds grow. We’ll be rich old men. You’ll be happy to know that I’ve already taken important steps to ensure their happiness by allowing them to engage in their primitive rituals, like the Ghost Dance. But, only when their off work, you see.”
Sitting Bull’s ears perked up, “What do you know about the Ghost Dance, toka?”
Sweat, Schemes, and a Whiff of Latex
“Draining the trees is easier than scheming the natives.” ~ The Clown
Rockwell knew the heat was miserable—the buzz of a jungle flies unbearable, the air thick as soup. But America was beginning to crave rubber. Quiet tires on new automobiles promised riches. One hundred seventy thousand acres in the Amazon, twenty-five thousand indigenous slaves, and it was all his. In a burst of optimism, he named his plantation “DestinyTerra.”
Back in the United States, greedy investors threw their life savings at Rockwell’s get rich scheme. They would never know or care much about how many shares he’d sold, he was a legend. A rubber plantation might seem far-fetched investment compared to buying in to a new railroad, but Rockwell seemed to have the winning hand. It was exhilarating. It was masturbatory. Exotic insects and malaria kept the investors away. Those who might be so skeptical as to make the long journey to see for themselves would face mean little insects and animals, guaranteed fevers, and contrived fatal accidents before ever seeing DestinyTerra.
Forced labor was the brutal engine for Rockwell’s rubber empire. He’d lied to Sitting Bull. Forest people were rounded up deep in the canopy and marched out of the rainforest to DestinyTerra where they’d be made to tap rubber trees for days on end. Working under armed guards, enduring whippings, starvation, and disease, life was uglier than they could have ever imagined. The latex was smoked into resin, rolled into balls, and loaded onto ships—fueling Rockwell’s wealth and America’s new demand for rubber. Rockwell’s men beat their natives for working too slowly while making sure they were too tired to resist.
To hide what they were doing from themselves Rockwell’s men first tried calling the natives “seringueiros,” thinking it would cause their forest native captives to think better of themselves. They then offered trinkets—shiny objects. The newly anointed seringueiros couldn’t understand why two weeks of labor earned one tin lid and two dried mangos, drenched in lard. Despite the new titles and perks, they took every chance to lay down their buckets and vanish back into the forest.
Rockwell’s legendary girth had a palliative effect on his nerves, but it did nothing for his consciousness. He blamed his perpetual brain fog on the demands of his part-time job as an Indian agent as well as unseen, evil forces. His fellow tycoons told him he could live on his impulses alone. He’d have to bring in a consultant to help with his forest people problem.
Rockwell had heard rumbles about a mechanical engineer who worked miracles. Apparently, industries could be vastly improved by monitoring how and where employees moved during the workday using stopwatches. Between slugs of whiskey, Rockwell had ordered his assistant to write this very consultant about how to solve the labor problem at DestinyTerra. Rockwell received his reply in a week.
“Your real problem is not one of slavery, sir. It’s inefficiency. You suffered from a tragic lack of clipboards. First, it is necessary to determine how long it takes an average seringueiro to walk from hut to tree.” Once that was determined, DestinyTerra’s overseers would need to cut their wasted motions including glancing at the river or speaking to their relatives. The consultant went on to explain that “rubber tapping could be broken into 37 scientifically optimized micro-gestures, each with a prescribed wrist angle.” It was all scientific and all very simple when managers made continual use of a stopwatch. The consultant urged Rockwell and his managers to re-route their seringueiros’ “fixation on ghosts, jungle spirits, and other hocus pocus toward the high culture found in the Western cannon perhaps by organizing as a Shakespearian performing company, which in turn, would aid in recruiting more slaves from the darkest jungle.” Plantation owners in the antebellum South had used music and drama to good effect with their slaves the consultant ventured, and he could think of no good reason this strategy couldn’t also benefit the Amazon. Should he be wrong, he noted, Rockwell and his managers should not discount incentive pay. As an example, the consultant recommended, that for every thousand strokes of the machete, a seringueiro might earn one extra tin lid for which he or she would be reminded of the joy they should feel by reaching a quota. This is how you transform a hellscape. Very straightforward. Very simple.
When he read the consultant’s letter, the Clown whooped it up. He rolled through the brush, swept himself up the nearest rubber tree, extended his
The Clown read the consultant’s letter once, twice, then a third time, just to be sure that ignorance and stupidity weren’t typos. Then he whooped so loud the macaws took off like they’d seen God. Or the devil. He staggered backward, laughing, rolled into the bushes, and came up with twigs in his hair and a beetle on his nose, cackling, “Scientific management! For slaves!”
He launched himself up into the nearest rubber tree, hanging upside down from a branch like a deranged bat, and summoning forth his best Harvard accent spit out, “Dear Mister Rockwell, your problem is not kidnapping, starvation, or whips—it is suboptimal wrist angles!” He mimed the consultant with a stopwatch, timing an invisible seringueiro. “You see, if you reduce the time these fools spend on ‘unauthorized glances at the sky’ and ‘looking at their relatives’ movements from four per hour to one, output increases by 17.3 percent! The jungle will be forced to weep with gratitude.”
Catching his breath, the Clown hailed the truth. The jungle had already sucked the souls out of all DestinyTerra’s overseers and shucked them all under the bushes. The jungle, the river, the relatives, and the Ghost Dance could never be replaced. The “forest people problem” would never be solved on any terms but their own.
