"One would have to consult Richard Sale's novel to determine whether the freakish gaps, detours and red herrings [in the film The White Buffalo] are ascribable (in whole or in part) to the original source. As the movie version stands, the bewildering lack of motivation for Hickok's recurring white buffalo nightmare—from which he invariably wakes blasting away with pistols in each hand—suggests, along with a lot of other inponderables, that a great deal of background exposition has either been eliminated or drastically reduced, leaving a peculiarly disassembled narrative in its wake..."
- Jonathan Rosenbaum, The Monthly Film Bulletin (Feb 1978)
Don't worry, Mr. Rosenbaum. I got you.
For my birthday this year (2024), James scared up a copy of Richard Sale's 1975 novel The White Buffalo, as we had watched the bewildering 1977 movie adaptation in April and I think it amused him how much time I spent contemplating it. (And that I was inspired to write 4800 words about it.)
Sharing in Rosenbaum's curiosity as to how the film ended up the way it did, I decided to read my ostensible gag gift. In the conclusion of my piece on the film, I quoted Larry McMurtry's contemporary review of the novel listed on the film's wikipedia page, where he said Sale "chose a topic with great possibilities, turned it into a sharpened stake and proceeded to impale himself on it." So now that I've read it, do I agree with McMurtry's assessment of the novel?
No. I emphatically do not.
I think this novel is actually pretty good, bordering on really good. The writing, though I do have some critique, particularly of some of the dialog affectations, was perfectly fine at worst and frequently quite good, with some good characterization, deft interactions, and a strong sense of atmosphere. I found the pacing and plot to be compelling and it was authentically tense at appropriate times.
Both main characters have clear motivations and the novel is tightly structured with no real wasted story elements, in great contrast to the film which is plagued with cul-de-sacs, setups with no payoffs, payoffs with no setups, and narrative imbalance. Pretty much every head scratching thing in the film is a result of a fumbled adaptation, rather than an inevitable inheritance from the source material.
In my earlier piece I speculated that maybe Sale, who was the screenwriter, couldn't bring himself to kill some of his darlings and included a bunch of stuff from the novel he should have cut but now I really don't think that was not the case. Given how many people have their hands in the making of a movie and the nature of the sometimes small but rather consequential changes, this film feels to me like it got meddled with.
Bluntly, I don't think the state of the final film is Sale's "fault," either as novelist or screenwriter.
So I'm going to be taking a dive into the novel, into its mechanics, its ideas, its execution and then I'm going to invariably take another look at the adaptation.
(I had to watch this f*cking movie again, btw.)
Plot Summary of the Novel
The broad plot strokes of The White Buffalo are actually really similar to the film, though it has a different structure. The novel is broken into three sections, the first titled "White Man" and focusing on James Otis (aka: Wild Bill Hickok). The second section is "Red Man" with Worm (aka: Crazy Horse) as the point of view character and covering the same time span as part 1.
Part 3, where the Otis and Worm stories converge is called "The Hunting."
Part 1
"White Man" opens with James Otis on a stage coach at night with a sleeping woman and a shady man named Coxy. The narration immediately reveals that Otis is a pseudonym, but does not reveal his true identity and only refers to him as Otis. Otis falls asleep in the carriage and has a nightmare we do not see. He wakes up with his guns in his hands, fortuitously as it turns out Coxy was about to murder and rob him. He throws Coxy out of the coach in a storm.
The narrative flashes back to a few weeks earlier when Otis heard George Custer had found gold in the Black Hills and he, Otis, decided to go make money by hustling the inevitable tide of prospectors at cards. While he was on the train to Abilene, he had his first dream of a demonic white buffalo attacking him while unarmed in the snow. He woke up in fright and snapped two shots off into the empty bunk above him. The conductor recognized his true identity and, terrified of him, did not throw him off the train.
Back in the stage coach, Otis hears two shots in the distance and he and the driver find two bodies dead in the road, obviously sniped from the ridge line above them. As they are about to load the bodies into the carriage, the driver foolishly lights a match and another shot comes in. Otis responds by drawing immediately and firing five shots back towards the shooter in quick succession. The unseen shooter flees. The woman in the coach was hit by the last rifle shot. Otis and the driver load the two bodies from the road into the coach.
They arrive in the town of Fetterman and give the bodies to the coroner who tells them there's a rumor of a white buffalo, whose pelt is worth a lot of money, nearby in the Lakota lands. Otis goes to the inn and meets an old acquaintance, Poker Jenny. They sleep together. He has the nightmare again and is woken up by the frightened Jenny. She moves him into another room, and when he walks in and lights a match he sees a white buffalo head, panics and shoots it. Jenny and the other lodgers are shaken.
Part 2
"Red Man" opens with Worm at his daughter's funerary scaffold. The narration immediately reveals that this is not his birth name, but again does not reveal his true identity and only refers to him as Worm.
The narrative flashes back a few weeks earlier to Worm scouting George Custer's troop movements. He tells his friend He-Dog that he's seen a white buffalo but He-Dog is convinced it was just a vision.
Worm falls asleep and has a dream of the Giver spirit chastising him for letting the white men steal their land and honor and promises to give him a sign he will not like. Worm then has the same dream of being attacked by a white buffalo that Otis had, and is woken by He-Dog. They find ominous signs of a huge buffalo.
They return to their encampment and find that Worm's daughter has died of "the whites' coughing sickness" while he was off scouting Custer. Worm weeps for his daughter and his father says that, to protect his name, he must be known only as Worm until his heart heals. (Worm was his father's nickname, and does not appear to have any particular negative connotation.) His father tells him he must stay in the encampment until he can take his name back, but Worm disobeys and goes off to his daughter's grave in the hills.
On his way there he encounters two white men on the trail and, angry and grief-stricken, shoots them. Soon after, Otis's stage coach arrives and he takes a shot at them when the driver lights his match. Otis's return volley nearly kills him. He leaves, but wonders if the man he briefly saw in the match light could be the legendary and treacherous Lakota killer called "Hehcoc."
Worm makes it to his daughter's funerary scaffold, and mourns. Since she died from a white man's disease she cannot rest in the afterlife. He prays for guidance and after two days of deprivation, he sees what he thinks is a white buffalo and kills it. It was a regular buffalo covered in snow, but Worm takes it as a sign that he needs the white buffalo's pelt to give his daughter rest.
Part 3
In Fetterman Otis meets his old friend, the one eyed Charlie Zane at the Frozen Dog tavern. Charlie tells Otis he's seen a white buffalo recently. A group of rough buffalo hunters lead by a man named Kileen, come in looking for trouble and the tavern owner, Brady, asks Otis to have his back if something goes down. Otis refuses, even after Brady threatens to reveal Otis's real identity to Kileen, who is the father of a man Otis killed 5 years earlier in a shootout with Tom Custer's men.
Brady tips off Kileen and Kileen sends one of his compatriots to start a fight. After a (very) brief shootout which ends with one of Kileen's men dead, Otis and Zane leave the saloon. Kileen calls Otis by his real name, Wild Bill Hickok. The narration calls him Hickok for the rest of the novel.
Both Hickok and Worm have stopped having the nightmare. Worm, on the trail of the white buffalo, is ambushed by a group of Crow, presumably also looking for it. Hickok and Zane hear the shots and Hickok decides to attack the Crow, despite the fact that they are usually allied with the whites. Hickok and Zane save Worm, and Worm uses sign language to thank them from afar. He leaves, wondering if Hickok is the man from the stage coach earlier.
Hickok and Zane make their way into the mountains and see the white buffalo from a distance. They make camp in a cave the buffalo had been using. In the morning, the buffalo kills one of their horses and flees. Enraged, Hickok charges out into the snow to follow it and is ambushed by Kileen and his two remaining men. Worm saves Hickok by warning him about the man who has gotten behind him unseen, and then outright kills the last two. Hickok invites Worm to ride out an incoming snowstorm in their camp.
Worm and Hickok have several long and tense conversations but declare each other as friends and brothers. Worm reveals he needs the pelt for his daughter's soul. The next morning Worm sneaks away to hunt the buffalo alone.
Hickok realizes the best way to find this aggressive and possibly mystical buffalo is to let it hunt and attack them, so they camp upwind and in the open. That night it attacks. The first part of the fight unfolds like the dream and Hickok, without his guns, is knocked down. Worm appears and jumps on the buffalo's back to stabs at it with an arrow. The buffalo bucks him off, kicks him in the head, and seemingly flees. Hickok, armed only with a knife, runs to help the dazed Worm when the buffalo reappears and attacks. Hickok grabs Worm's old pistol from his belt and stuns the buffalo with a headshot that knocks it down a few feet from them. As it starts to rise he shoots it again from close range as Worm cuts at its throat with Hickok's dropped knife. One final shot in the eye finishes it off.
Zane wants to kill Worm and take the pelt. Hickok stops him and says the pelt belongs to Worm. Zane swears at Hickok, using his last name. Zane leaves. After Worm has skinned the buffalo, three of his friends arrive but he offers Hickok his protection, despite now knowing for sure that Hickok is the treacherous killer Worm suspected he might have been. They swear they are brothers but will only see each other as a white man and a red man and be enemies if they meet again.
In an epilogue of sorts, Hickok returns to Cheyenne with the buffalo skull, which he sells for good money. He is content. Worm wraps his daughter in the pelt and returns to his home, where his father declares he can now take his name again: Crazy Horse.
The end.
Writing Mechanics
The White Buffalo is an easy read being both pretty fast paced and relatively short at about 200 pages. It's also far more focused than the mess of a movie. There's a lot more interiority to the characters here than in the film, which to some degree is expected as it's, you know, a book, but to be honest I thought it was going to be more of a purely plot driven adventure narrative. It's written in a fairly close third person which invites the reader to empathize with Otis and Worm, the two point of view characters.
This really is a story with two protagonists, as both Otis and Worm are given just about equal page time. The novel, arguably, tilts more strongly to Worm than Otis, whose motivations are less straightforward. I don't count that murkiness as a weakness, as I think it is intentional and reflects the weary, broken down purposelessness that Otis starts the story with.
The structure, where parts 1 and 2 are occurring concurrently, really reinforces the parallelism between the two leads that pervades the novel and is key to its themes.
As I alluded to earlier, it's pretty tightly constructed and I can really only think of one brief flashback scene in part 2 that doesn't obviously serve much of purpose.
Jargon
Probably the biggest critique I have in the writing is the amount of jargon and simile in places, mostly confined to dialog by the white characters. Stuff like this:
"No wonder I couldn't read your hand!" She was nicely outraged. "The Bill I know would've been holdng a pair of jacks with an ace kicker and drawing down two cards before he ever cleared the stirrups. He'd've been asking after a parlor house to romp in before he ever looked for a bed to sleep in!" (p30)
It's not even that it isn't verisimilitudinous sentence by sentence, it's just a volume problem. It would be like someone trying to use Zoomer slang and, even if they use each piece correctly, if there's too much of it right in a row, it won't sound natural and it's a little distracting.
The slight overuse of jargon comes up occasionally in the narration, too, like this:
Brady slopped the mule skinner together, a halt. breed concoction of young whiskey and blackbem brandy. The idea was for the blackberry to kill the taste of raw red-eye, which was rifer in the boondols than Old Crow or Hofstetter's Bitters. The whiskey was eighty proof, the brandy ninety. (p86)
It isn't maddeningly pervasive or anything, but it happens enough that I noticed. Ironically, if the book didn't have a lot of really deft writing I might not have registered it. The line after the above quote is "It was a drink guaranteed to inhibit cowardice and encourage stupidity," which is kind of an awesome line.
There's a lot of detail about the weaponry too, which while not particularly distracting, stood out to me. Judging from the bibliography in the back, Sale did a lot a research so I'm sure it was tempting to use a lot of the tidbits he'd picked up.
Good Stuff
Those quibbles with some of the writing choices interest me because of how they contrast to some really fantastic descriptions that are also present and feel more, for lack of a better word, effortless. I really liked stuff like this part of Hickok's nightmare, which feels very Moby Dick:
In horrid fascination he watched the snow below him churn and roil and out of it, inevitably, the buffalo appeared, whiter than whalebone, its seven-foot hump rising high from its icy mausoleum. The bloody eyes glowed and a fiery halo danced daintily across the hairy skull between the two scarlet horns. (p33)
The White Buffalo is described as a pulp novel but to me it was more elevated, introspective, and deeper than, say, a stereotypical airport genre read. The narration often has an elegiac, almost mournful tone, like in this description of Worm's daughter:
She had been so alone these two weeks since her cruel death from the white man's coughing-sickness, alone with the throating wolves that scented her flesh and came to gnash her bones, foiled only by the stoutness of her bier; alone under the brittle stars which lighted her trek without feeling; alone in the terrible storm with lightning scorching her tall sentinels and thunder rattling her rude catafalque. So awfully alone until Worm finally found her. (p43)
Or this one:
Worm wished he could have spared her compassion, but there was none in him, only a terrible hollowness. ... She had been a quiet wife and a faithful mother to the Little One, the missing one, They-Are-Afraid-of-Her, their little girl of only two winters, she with the bright eyes of the porcupine, the raucous laughter of the magpie, the high mischief of the pack rat; she who had not yet known the wonders of the earth and the beauties of the night sky. And now, never would. (p67)
Also worth mentioning is that dialogs between old friends Otis and Zane, particularly their first one, where they good-naturedly give each other shit are written extremely well. The two men feel like they know each other and their exchanges are frequently genuinely funny.
There's also some really elegant exposition weaved in to some of it, especially in the scene where Zane is trying to tell Otis about the white buffalo he saw while the barely listening Otis is trying to tell Zane how they should play the Frozen Dog fight that he figures is about to happen. They are believably talking past each other and the reader gets double the exposition in one naturalistic conversation.
Conflicting Frontiers
This is not a very romanticized view of the West, or at least the white frontiersmen. Everyone is filthy, greedy, and ready to blackmail, do violence or set violence in motion to get ahead. Even Otis is only going to Fetterman to swindle gamblers and the gold prospectors he is pretty sure aren't even going to find anything. He thinks Custer's gold rush is a con, and he's going to profit from it.
Hickok himself gives the most concise summation of the white frontier ethos, when he thinks:
Because the whites did not worship Almighty God half as much as they idolized the Almighty Dollar. That was the rowel that blooded bellies — gold, silver, and land. It did not matter whose you stole. (p162)
This applies to the white buffalo itself. While Worm believes that the white buffalo is sacred, a renewable resource that will be reborn after he kills it, the whites in general (and HIkcok initially) only see it as a commodity born of extremely rare chance.
The Native American characters and culture come off much better in general, though I do wonder if this book drifts into some Noble Savage trope or trope-adjacent territory. Sale is definitely sympathetic to them and, given some of the books in the bibliography, I think he is well intentioned on how he handles Lakota representation but I don't know enough about that culture to really gauge how successful (or terrible) it is.
A tiny thing that stuck out to me was a small word choice difference in how Otis is described versus how Worm is, in parallel scenes that are meant to show how straightforward both men are. Otis is described as "uncomplicated" but Worm is described as "simple." My suspicion is that this difference is an unfortunate use of a thesaurus and Sale didn't notice the implications; I one hundred percent believe it was subconscious. But it's there and I wonder if there's more that, given my cultural background, I didn't pick up on.
There's also potentially something in that, as strongly motivated as character is, Worm doesn't really get an arc, whereas Hickok does, and one that is facilitated by Worm's nobility:
Honor was something akin. Someone planted a seed of truth in your soil and it grew into a Carson honesty, until finally, when it was ripe enough, it became a treasure called Integrity. That was the trail that the Oglala was drawing out for him. This waspy little pagan was unknowingly more Christian than Hickok's pious father had knowingly been. (p169)
If there is something here, again, I do think that it was subconscious on Sale's part. He gave too much detail and attention to Worm to have intended him only to be the vessel for Hickok's endgame growth. (I'm sure this won't come up later regarding the film.)
"Red Man" and "White Man" - Parallelism
Even beyond the novel's overarching macro-structure, there are a ton of explicit parallels between the two leads. These are both parallels of character, like when the two men have the same internal reactions or process the same internal conflict, and of situation, where one man will be put in predicament that echoes something that has already happened to the other.
A scene that is example of both is Kileen's ambush of Hickok, where the deliberation Worm goes through prior to intervening is similar to Hickok's when the latter saved him from the Crow ambush.
All the parallels allow Sale to explore the ways Hickok and Worm are in consonance and the ways where they are in dissonance, becoming foils to each other. In these dissonances one (usually Hickok) becomes a sort of cracked mirror version of the other.
The Dream
One of the most obvious consonances between Worm and Hickok is that they are both having the white buffalo nightmare, a fact that, interestingly, neither finds out about the other. Both men dream of themselves unarmed in the snow facing down a charging beast, with Hickok missing his pistols and Worm's bowstring fouled by dew. While both men find the dream terrifying, they react to it rather differently and revealingly.
Worm sees the nightmare as a sign from the great Giver and an explicit prophecy. He never doubts the dream is guiding him to a literal and singular buffalo. He accepts the dream and in the final confrontation, does not try to change fate.
Hickok doesn't even initially believe there is a real white buffalo, having heard the last one had been killed recently at the Cimarron river. He doesn't have any idea what his nightmare means and rejects any sort of pre-determinism, though by trying to alter how the final fight begins, he unwittingly just recreates the dream.
The mechanics of both men having the same dream don't really make logical sense, but in that confoundedness lies a stark difference between the protagonists. Worm explicitly thinks, regarding the white buffalo, that in contrast to the whites who feel a "strange madness" when faced with a mystery, that "Mysteries...did not require solving. They were to be believed." (p115)
Bluntly, Worm has faith and room for the supernatural in his worldview and Hickok doesn't. Hickok explicitly rejects spirituality in general when he figures out why Worm wants the pelt:
"What kind of Christian God or Indian Great Spirit could devour the innocent so calmly without reason or conscience? Religion is bullshit." (p167)
Names and Identities
The other really obvious parallel is that both characters are introduced and referred to in the narration by explicit aliases, though the nature of this aliasing is different.
Otis is a persona Hickok has adopted himself to hide his real identity and protect his body. Crazy Horse is given his father's moniker by the old man as a means to protect his name while he grieves.
This is even reflected in the language of the narration, where James Butler Otis is "not his real name" where Worm is "not his own name." It's a subtle difference but I think an important one.
Worm seems at peace with this and accepts his birth name back from his father after the intentional acts of putting his daughter's soul at ease and completing his mourning. Otis becomes Hickok again involuntarily when an enemy outs him and he "sighed unhappily, having enjoyed the anonymity of Otis while it lasted." (p111)
All this is why I've generally been referring to Worm as "Worm" in this piece rather than Crazy Horse, but referring to Hickok as "Hickok." Crazy Horse is Worm until the last few sentences of the novel, Hickok was just cosplaying as Otis.
Hatred
An important part of both Hickok and Worm is their explicit hatred of the other's people. Both express this very early in their respective POV sections.
Hickok:
James Otis could not repress the curl of his lips in repugnance. He hated Indians. Vermin-ridden lampoons of Man. He felt his stomach tighten unpleasantly. He rubbed the shiny hip scar, then relaxed, glad to be distracted by the settlement. (p23)
Worm:
What savages these wasichu were! An awful people who beat their children, who stole twice what they needed, yet let their blood brothers starve to death. Creatures who let their hair grow across their face like animals; whose bitter stench and lack of bath announced their comings and goings. Walking beasts, without mercy, who killed for pleasure, never understanding the meaning of the world around them. (p70)
While the narration mostly reserves omniscient moral judgement, with most of the explicitly judgmental content being inherited from the close character POVs, there are some tells in the language that it is definitely more on the side of the Native Americans.
For example, the narration doesn't use euphemism when describing Hickok and Zane's ambush of the Crows attacking Worm and calls it a "massacre." And, in a flashback recounting how Charlie Zane lost his eye to the Cheyenne:
Not that you could blame the Tsistsistas-the Humans, as the Cheyennes called themselves for their fury. Not over three miles northwest at Horseshoe Bend lay a barren, bloody ground where, four years previous, a sadistic Methodist preacher named Colonel John Chivington had slaughtered four hundred lodges of Black Kettle's people after Black Kettle had journeyed to Jim Denver's town, pleading for peace.
No, you couldn't blame them for blackening up their faces and turning this desert into white-knuckle country. For even after the Cheyenne dead were strewn like spring seeds along the banks of the Creek, Chivington and his men had not stopped their senseless malice.
They carved off the breasts and privates of the squaws and carried them intact to Denver to exhibit to a gleeful populace. That was a big enough burr to plant under anybody's rump, much less a Cheyenne buck with his ingrained sense of justice. (p92)
I also very much like that the narration goes out of its way to include the detail that the Cheyennes referred to themselves as the Humans, which highlights that the barbarity inflicted on them was done to, you know, people.
In contrast, right after the above passage, Hickok says:
"Don't blame the preacher!" Otis said icily. "These scurvy scuttlers'd be drooling to hang our wigs on a lance even if they had just shaken hands with us in a peace powwow!" He did not believe in red honesty, since no Indian he had ever met had survived long enough to offer it.
Which is a stunning denial of humanity, combined with some impressive hypocrisy considering Hickok is famous among the Lakota for back shooting the Native American peace envoy Zheulee. This isn't surprising given the white frontier ethos I mentioned earlier; the white character's don't try to deny they are breaking treaties and stealing, they try to justify it.
This is the backdrop for Worm and Hickok's long conversations in the cave during the snowstorm. They confront each other's humanity, but I like that no one completely alters their worldview. They don't fix frontier racism with a few conversations; they can't. They may not have reflexive personal distaste after their experiences together, but they have intractable cultural and social conflicts and are at the mercy of forces far larger than they are.
I thought their conversations felt fairly authentic, with Hickok doing the sort of reflexive and, given how much he respects Worm, almost half hearted whataboutism that people do when confronting entrenched worldviews and having to face their own complicity. Hickok is wrenched by the contradictions and the intractableness of it all as he, maybe for the first time, looks a Native American in the eye.
They part as friends, but Hickok is still ready to mow down Worm's three friends at the end, without being all that conflicted about it. And Crazy Horse will still lead the rout of the American army at Little Bighorn two years later.
Bill Hickok
The Bill Hickok of the novel, in keeping with the book's portrayal of the frontier West, is a decidedly unromantic figure. Being a legendary gunfighter seems exhausting and soul destroying. He drifts through the West without much purpose. And he's slowing down, with failing eyesight and a mess of aches and old wounds:
At thirty-seven he was far too old to be a living gunfighter and much too young to be suffering the cruel rheumatism which infected his old wounds: the bullet holes in each shoulder, the livid scar on his left arm from the cinnamon bear he had fought in Raton Pass, the horrid cavity in his right hip where he had taken the full bite of a Cheyenne war lance. Much too young for this fading eyesight which hung constant mists over his world. "Deep Serene," one doctor had called it, a form of amaurosis which decayed the optic nerve. But most doctors were agreed that it was gonorrheal ophthalmia, about which they could do nothing. It was ironic to be blighted by the plaint which made boys men. (p9)
There's also the nagging feeling that his life is about to catch up to him and he knows his time is running out. Even in his Otis persona he's overwhelmed by paranoia, constantly assessing every room by it's potential for ambush and being hyper aware of where the exits are. He is not safe anywhere.
"If it was me, I'd never sleep again" - Guilt
Hickok also feels guilt about his life, something that is very subtextual at the beginning but surfaces explicitly at the end. The outward disguise of James Otis has the added benefit of allowing him to morally distance himself from Bill Hickok. The first sign of something amiss in his conscience is his response to Poker Jenny when she asks why he isn't going by the name Bill anymore: "He's no longer a friend of mine." (p30)
The narration refers to him as Otis after the end of Worm's section when his true identity as Hickok is revealed to the reader. This is subtle but important. He only changes back to Hickok when Hickok decides the jig is up, not when reader knows. It makes the obfuscation significant to the character rather than just a mystery to surprise the reader. Hickok really was trying to be someone else. (I'm sure this won't come up later regarding the film.)
An early conversation with Poker Jenny where he bristles at her rather accurate description of him is also telling:
"Lucas used to say you was like a tawny old fly-bit lion, a high lonesome painter come down from the eagle peaks to have a look-see at all the other critters on the flat, never trusting a soul, your tail curled tight against a bushwhack. And all the time cat eyes, purely gimlets, seeing everything and everybody. and being mad at the whole damned world."
"Squaw talk!" he snapped angrily. "I am a man of comity. I am a man of peace."
"Comity?" She sat back and hooted, "Oh, bụt surely you are. The most polite, most civil shootist to ever blew out a man's brains."
Otis reared. "I have always dodged a fight."
"Oh, come off the high horse," Jenny said flatly. "You and your airs and your honor. Just how many souls have you put in a box?"
"Upwards of fifty," Otis said with flinty dignity. "And every damned one of them deserved it, most of them being redskins."
Poker Jenny shuddered. "My God, if it was me, I'd never sleep again.” (p32)
Her last line is unwittingly prescient. He is, in fact, haunted by nightmares despite his defensiveness and protestations of honor.
Also his "Deserved it" ise doing some heavy lifting here, seeing as Hickok will soon unhesitatingly kill Aaron, the peacekeeper from the Frozen Dog, who's only fault was he was set up in a way that his field of fire put Hickok in danger.
Baby Steps - A Character Arc
Worm and Hickok are both wrestling with ghosts, but where Worm's journey to lay his daughter's spirit to rest and assuage his guilt over being absent in her last days is an external quest with a literal object, Hickok's journey is an internal one.
He begins the story purposeless with just mercenary ambitions but by the time of the final hunt, even with his unbelief, even with his hatreds he clearly intends to help Worm and let the extremely valuable pelt go.
At the end he expresses genuine remorse about murdering Zhuelee the peacekeeper all those years ago and he feels shame when the whites' treaty breaking comes up. Those aren't brave or radical moral positions by any means, but they show he's come a long way from being the man who justified butchering of the Cheyenne and dismissed all the men he'd killed as all deserving it.
After his talks with Worm, the narration explicitly reveals his small progress:
Up to now he had belonged to Uncle Billy Sherman's school for treatment of the Indians: extermination. It had seemed the only practical way to open up the land; certainly the only straight tongue that these hard-shell murderers could understand. (p161) [emphasis mine]
It might not matter very much to the frontier conflict as a whole, but it's something. And it does occur to Hickok that Worm is likely an important person among the Lakota, and that maybe their breaking bread together could be an avenue to end the conflict between the whites and the Native Americans. It's an inchoate thought, a flight of fancy that nothing comes of, but it is something that would never have crossed a younger Hickok's mind.
Even before Hickok and Worm talk, there's some hints of ambivalence in Hickok. When he, with no hesitation, intervenes to help Worm against the white allied Crows that are in Lakota territory, his motives are a little ambiguous.
I think it's significant that Hickok's less noble intentions for intervening (e.g. wanting to kill Natives, contingency planning so he and Zane won't be attacked next, wanting to see if Worm knows about the white buffalo) are all spoken aloud to Zane, and not revealed in his point of view. In a book that isn't shy about revealing the character's thoughts, it's curiously withholding during this incident. Is it maybe because he hates bullies? Is it because he knows the Lakota territory, one of the last Native strongholds, is being encroached on? Is it because he feels a connection he doesn't understand to Worm, a man he is unwittingly sharing dreams with? I don't know, and I like that those possibilities are on the table.
Helping Worm get the white buffalo pelt is undeniably a good thing, and Hickok ends the story more content than we've ever seen him.
Worm
Worm has less of a character journey than Hickok does, but it is his daughter's death and his response to it that are the inciting incidents of the novel. If Hickok in part 1 is just sort of meandering about, Worm in part 2 is much more motivated and driven. From the start, he has purpose, whether he is scouting Custer's troops or mourning his Little One.
Worm's conflict with the whites is absolutely integral to his character and the events of the novel. While he is away scouting the white man's encroaching army, his daughter dies of a white man's disease, which in his eyes damns her soul and impels him to hunt the white buffalo.
So his daughter's death is tied directly into his hatred of white men and the strife between Natives and whites, which later he and Hickok become avatars of. Removing this tie would render the rest of the story purposeless and confused. (I'm sure this won't come up later regarding the film.)
I really like this evocative, and allegory laden, passage from his journey to his daughters funerary scaffold:
Once, in a marshy green park, a bowl among the rainswept hills, he saw a small herd of buffalo, huddled together, facing the weather as brave buffalo always did. The herd rumbled like the thunder as it circled itself incessantly, trying to keep warm. Their friction raised a blue halo over their humps, laced with crackling sparks, which sometimes flickered into pale flame. Then the aura sucked down a lightning finger into the heart of the herd.
Still they did not stampede. The slain remained on the sodden grass. The survivors staggered to their feel unsteadily and faced the tempest staunchly once more. grunting and bellowing furiously.
Some of their anger snaked into Worm's heart; his blood began to heat. (p71)
This anger and grief leads him to attack the travelers on the road to Fetterman and first cross paths with Hickok.
In his talks with Hickok, he is much less conflicted, because of course he is. Like with the "who should get the white buffalo pelt" question, there's not really a moral debate to be had, as Hickok acknowledges:
There was no doubt that of the two quests for the white buffalo, the Indian's was the noblest, an unselfish act of filial love, beside which the shinking avarice of the whites faded into vileness. For them the dead buffalo would only mean money for gaming and red-eyed cock crowing. For the little squaw it would mean Heaven. (p168)
Hickok is thinking about the white buffalo here, but I think there's a deeper implication buried in there.
Worm has less of an arc than Hickok because he is much less ambivalent. He, like Hickok, lets go of some of his reflexive animus toward the other man in specific, and even grants a minor amnesty when he chooses not to reveal Hickok's identity to his friends. But the wider conflict remains.
Buffalo Mysticism
One last point of interest in the novel is the nature of the white buffalo dreams. They are clearly supernatural as they are, indeed, prophetic. Worm immediate interprets them as a vision from the Great Spirit and so is unfazed by this, but Hickok who thought they were just nightmares is appropriately freaked out when they look like they are about to come true:
"By Heaven, this is it!" In his excitement Hickok's voice screeched, and in the dusk it was answered by an owl in a nearby pine tree. ... Hickok's blue eyes were wide in awe and wonder as he peeled a long look across the panorama that had unfolded before them. He pointed silently, but his hand was trembling like a wind-whipped aspen. (p183)
This is where the novel might get a little muddled, thematically. Hickok was instrumental to Worm getting the pelt, but who led him there and why?
The first time we see Worm's dream it's combined with a vision of the anger of the Great Spirit about how Worm's people are ceding ground to the whites and have lost their faith in the Great Spirit's guidance by using the white's man tools.
If that is the true message, which we have no real reason not to believe since the rest of the dream came true, then why does Hickok also have the dream, albeit only the part about the white buffalo?
Especially since the hunt leads to a minor reconciliation between the two men and some healing for Hickok, it seems odd that the Great Spirit would gift the vision to Hickok too. Having said that, I suppose Worm does land on "You and I are brothers, but if we meet again we will just be enemies" and that despite their personal connection, the war will go on. But Worm used the white man's tools, via Hickok, to down the buffalo so..... eh?
There's enough ambiguity that I could come up with lot's of potential ways to square this circle, and I appreciate that Sale didn't try to wrap up a very tidy explanation, though I could see that
this aspect and its looseness could be unsatisfying for some.
I didn't really notice any of this while I was reading, and it was only when I was thinking about it more deeply later that it occurred to me.
The Adaptation, Revisited
And now, the moment I've all been waiting for: Let's talk about that movie again.
A Brief Bit about Sale
Richard Sale (1911-1993) started out as a writer for pulp magazines in the 30s, then became screenwriter, with a lot of film credits (>20) in the 40s and 50s, after which it looks like he transitioned mostly to television writing. He also directed 12 films, mostly in the 50s. It's actually a little hard to tell how many novels he wrote, as he's not very well attested online, but it looks to be about 9.
All that to say he wasn't a greenhorn in 1977, with regards to either writing in general, or the film business in specific.
An Encapsulation
I mentioned above that I no longer think the final state of the film is because of the screenplay, and I think the example that really encapsulates why is the film's voiceover at the very beginning. The film opens with Hickok's dream (and we'll get to the dream in a bit) and then he wakes up shooting on the train. (Recall that the novel opens on the stage coach to Fetterman and the train incident is relayed via flashback.)
Right after Hickok apologizes, Bixby the conductor says "By God, Mr. Otis, you will stow those damned irons in your carpetbag, or I'll stop this train and set you out in Wyoming on your boots!"
And then immediately, there's this voiceover from Bixby:
In September of 1874, Wild Bill Hickok came back to the old west. I didn't place him then because he was wearing a different name and he had a strange bee in his bonnet. A deadly dream that was eating out his soul. A nightmare that he had to hunt down and face up to before it turned him into a raving maniac. I ought to know. I was there.
Which.... what?
This makes no sense on just about every level. First, it immediately obliterates any mystery to the alias of James Otis and putting it right on the heels of "By God, Mr. Otis" tells the viewer that the Otis persona is completely unimportant. (The film will shortly reinforce this superfluousness when he is immediately recognized again in Cheyenne.)
Second, it just tells you that his dream is driving him mad and that he is motivated to hunt down the white buffalo and this injects the motivation problems I mentioned in my previous piece: Why does he think he needs to hunt this buffalo and why does he even think his dream is of a specific literal buffalo anyway?
And from a narrative structure perspective, having Bixby say this makes no sense. He is not a character in this, he never shows up again after the train, and the voiceover never comes back so it's not even a limp framing narrative. "I ought to know, I was there!" ... No you weren't.
It's so superfluous that I didn't even remember it from my first viewing, and neither did James when I asked, and yet it kind of screws a lot of stuff up immediately. James and I both remembered the information it inelegantly just stated, but neither of us had any memory that it was the train conductor.
I absolutely refuse to believe that this was in the screenplay and that Sale, a man who clearly knows how to structure and tell a tale, would absolutely kneecap his own story right out of the gate. This feels like the kind of late studio note that happens because their worried that audiences are stupid and will be bored if they aren't told everything immediately, storytelling be damned.
The Big Problem - One Protagonist
The most conspicuous adaptational change, made to the film's detriment, is the decision to jettison the dual protagonists. Novel Worm has about the same amount of page time as Hickok. By comparison, about an hour into a 97 minute movie, Worm had been onscreen for less than 4 minutes.
Obviously, given Worm's reduced presence, there's no parallelism in the film. He's not having the white buffalo dream and is just told to go on the hunt by his father for extremely unclear reasons. The camera is essentially never on his shoulder so we get almost nothing about him. Even the one scene where they almost maintained the parallelism, when Worm "saves" Hickok from Kileen, doesn't have the punch of the novel equivalent, because of the way it's filmed.
Novel Worm definitely saves Hickok's life during Kileen's ambush, tipping off Hickok to Ben's position and outright killing Gyp, both of whom had flanked Hickok and were about to shoot him from behind. In the film, Zane shoots Ben before Worm appears and Hickok definitely knows where Gyp is. Worm does take out Gyp and Kileen, but it's not all that clear that Hickok really needed him. The situation just isn't as dire as Worm's predicament with the Crow earlier.
Also, as I mentioned in my first look at the film, the geography editing is really poor so it's hard to tell where everyone is, and not in a good way. I don't know how much of this was spelled out in the script but i suspect it was a problem of the blocking and editing, which is just another example of how fumbling cinematic technique can neuter what might have been on paper a pretty book accurate scene.
The massive reduction of Worm is kind of a strange choice as it makes the story hard to tell. The cause and effect of everything is fuzzy, especially combined with the other big change in the film...
The Buffalo Attack
In the film, Worm's daughter is killed by the white buffalo when it attacks Worm's village. In addition to the scene being, um, dumb, it also eviscerates a lot of the thematic ideas of the novel, and contributes to the movie's imagistic muddiness.
It takes an inciting incident that in the novel is tied in to the story's themes and driven by a character's worldview and makes it just about a rampaging animal.
And the film also makes the decision to hunt the buffalo come not from Worm, but from his father who just gives him the quest because....shrug? He says:
Crazy Horse, my son. It is not fitting that the war chief of the Oglalas weeps like a young woman. Therefore, I take away your true name. You shall be called "Worm."...
It is time you sought out the holy bull. The Little One will be forever tortured in the other world until you wrap her in his white robe and cleanse her spirit of its pain.
But, like, why will she be tortured in the other world, and why does killing a holy symbol, the holy symbol that killed her, fix that? The novel answered this question neatly and in accordance with the larger conflict that is the backdrop for the story. The film's answer to this question is "...Shut up."
I said in my first look at the film that "a big problem here is that the white buffalo doesn't mean anything." Well, it did in the book. Also, since novel Worm believes the white buffalo will be reborn after its death, his willingness to kill it doesn't have the vaguely blasphemous sense it does in the film.
Movie Worm's father, in addition to immediately spoiling his real identity just as Bixby spoiled Hickok's, comes off as way more of a dick than his novel counterpart. In the book, he says this:
"I have taken away your name this day," his father said. "It is not good that a war chief's eyes should me water and it is not fit that the people should see the leader weeping like a woman. You must be brave, Curly. It is not a time for foolish acts. Therefore I have given you my own name until your weakness has passed under. You shall be called Worm because I am an old man and it does not matter if I am weak or my name is weak. It is only important that your true name stay whole. I shall hide it safely from you until your heart is strong again and you are fit to carry it."
"As you say," Worm agreed. "Le pila mita, father. Thank you.” (p68)
It's much gentler and it gives the impression that they believe names have metaphysical power and must be protected. When Worm defies his father and leaves to find the Little One's scaffold, his father forgives him immediately, saying "His heart is heavy."
Characterization and Motivation
The film is so disinterested in Worm that, while the white buffalo attack and daddy's fetch quest are weird and perfunctory, his motivation problem only comes into focus for someone familiar with the novel.
This is emphatically not the case with Hickok, the film's only real main character, who has what Rosenbaum called a "bewildering lack of motivation." There's so many overlapping levels to this that it's hard to know where to start, but let'a just start with "why is Hickok going to Fetterman?"
He has some lines about Custer's gold rush and needing money, same as the novel, but since we've already heard Bixby explicitly state that Hickok's journey is buffalo related his mercenary reason sounds like a cover story.
And then Hickok himself says to Jenny, in a film only line:
This damn dream, Jen, hangs on like a low water leech. If I don't kill this buff, the dream will kill me. It's like my own fate was chasing me into the grave.
But we don't know why he thinks this and it's not clear why the dream is so terrifying either. The dream is moody, unsettling, and even starkly beautiful but it does not justify Hickok's reaction to it. Critically, he is not a character in it at all, in contrast to the novel where he is in the snow in mortal danger as the buffalo charges him. His "madness" and "terror" in the film, then, look to be metaphorical, which is why his fixation on killing the buffalo and his surety that it is real are so strange.
Film Hickok is also weirdly coy about who gets the pelt saying "It will belong to the man who kills it." This is said by Worm in the book, in a fatalistic line about what will probably happen if he dies in the fight. Book Hickok wants to help Worm get it and even says he'll try to make Zane understand. Having Hickok say this line, even after he learns why Worm needs the pelt, makes him a jerk and then creates character whiplash when after they kill it he immediately gives it to Worm no questions asked, with no indication of why he changed his mind. It feels random. This is another example of theoretically small change that causes a lot of confusion for the characters.
The film's removal of the hatred of both men make their discussions about red and white man, some of which are almost word for word from novel, feel like they come out of nowhere. In my last piece I said they feel like an intrusion from another movie but now I know they are actually an Intrusion from the goddamned book this movie is adapted from.
The higher order issue is that book Hickok has an arc but film Hickok kind of doesn't in any way intelligible to the viewer which is what makes a lot of his actions and reactions seem unmotivated. Like the whole Otis persona, which in the novel was perhaps an attempt to leave Wild Bill behind and ties into his character arc but in the film is...pointless. It's just a needless complication.
Bronson's Hickok and Heroism
Film Hickok is far more overtly heroic than book Hickok, and I wonder if that change happened once Charles Bronson, a virtuous tough-guy movie star, signed on.
Bronson is craggy and worn but doesn't really capture the oppressive weariness of book-Hickok. Book Bill is at the end of his rope and knows he's slowing down at might be running out of luck. A subtle example of the dissonance in the portrayals is in the stage coach when Hickok stops Coxy from stabbing him. In the novel it's basically an accident. Hickok had his nightmare and woke up, gun in hand, just in the nick of time. He's hanging on by a very thin thread in contrast to his casual bad-assery in the film, where he's in complete control of the situation and was apparently only feigning sleep.
There is a coiled threat about book Hickok and even "innocent" people are wary of him, as he is known as a man of great violence. Bixby and Jenny aren't afraid of him in the film as they are in the novel, the way someone has nothing to fear from a virtuous hero, and the film soft peddles his past. The scene I quote above where Hickok bristles at Jenny's accurate assessment of him plays out differently in the film, in a way that is a good example of how the film has softened the character.
Recall the scene in the novel:
"Squaw talk!" he snapped angrily. "I am a man of comity. I am a man of peace."
"Comity?" She sat back and hooted, "Oh, bụt surely you are. The most polite, most civil shootist to ever blew out a man's brains."
Otis reared. "I have always dodged a fight."
"Oh, come off the high horse," Jenny said flatly. "You and your airs and your honor. Just how many souls have you put in a box?"
"Upwards of fifty," Otis said with flinty dignity. "Ad every damned one of them deserved it, most of them being redskins."
Poker Jenny shuddered. "My God, if it was me, I'd never sleep again.” p32
In the film, it's this:
Hickok
I'm a man of comity, I've always dodged a fight.
Jenny
Comity? Sure. You're the most politest shootist who ever blew a man's brains out.
Hickok
I'm too done in to even argue about it, Jen.
He's not defensive or angry at all, which robs the scene of any hint at a guilty conscience, or a conscience that has any reason to feel guilty in the first place. There's no mention of how many men he's killed, how much he hates Indians, nor is there Jenny's horrified and prescient reaction.
The closest the film comes is during a short interaction with Zane where Hickok says "Like Phil Sheridan said,"I ain't never seen a good Indian that wasn't dead" but it's not delivered with much conviction and this is the first time, almost halfway into the film, that any personal animus has come up. Also, not three minutes later Hickok unhesitatingly intervenes to save Worm, and without any of the ambiguity of whether he might be doing it to thin out the Crow before they inevitably attack him and Zane.
Bronson's Hickok is a romantic gunfighter archetype, and there's no examination as to what he must have done to become a legendary gunfighter, especially in the frontier West.
And there are no atrocities or dialog about atrocities against the Native Americans onscreen, unlike the novel where there are several that directly involve Hickok. There's two passing references to him killing Whistler the Peacemaker (Zhuelee of the novel) but without enough context to know what that means or the unambiguous murder-ness of it.
There's really not much sense in general that Hickok has done bad things that he should feel guilt or shame about.
The film also has Hickok say after his talk with Worm that "For a moment there was a chance just a chance," which really isn't earned at all, and is kind of tone deaf and ridiculous on its face. Taking book Hickok's passing thought and making it an explicit statement of intent goes, again, to making Bronson's Hickok more heroic, like the audience is meant to say "man, he sure tried to fix racism."
Another small but telling change in the film is that Jenny wants to sleep with him, but he turns her down and they part with her sad at his departure. In the novel they have sex pretty much straight away and she, terrified, wants nothing to do with him after he shoots up her inn.
All this stuff makes film Hickok out to be more a chaste and virtuous knight than the burned out mercenary he is in the novel and the story suffers for it.
Emphasis, Economy, and Imbalance
Movies have a different economy than books and a major failure of this film is how it mismanages this economy. I mentioned in my last piece how weird the stage coach scene is because it's a fairly long and complicated scene and it is very unclear what most of the elements are "for" dramatically.
The issues became really clear after experiencing the novel. Recall that in the novel, Hickok has a brief interaction with Coxy and then has the white buffalo nightmare. Crucially, we don't know what the dream actually is until the flashback to the train. The film made the not necessarily unwise choice to open on the train and show the dream, but this choice has the knock on effect of making the now later stage coach scene not really reveal any new information.
Also, the carriage scene scene is longer in the film, giving some lines to Cassie and adding some interaction between her and Hickok. (She's asleep in the novel.) In isolation this is all fine, and even leads to a legitimately funny joke when Cassie says "God damn this shitty weather" shortly after thanking Hickok for scolding Coxy for his foul mouth. But it's really inefficient on the macro level, as the only important thing this scene now has is the plot point of Worm shooting at the coach. And even the utility of this scene in the film is fuzzy, as without seeing any of Worm's motivation it is unclear why any of this is happening. The film also drops the part where Worm maybe recognizes him as Hickok after the exchange of fire, which makes some sense as there is no mystery to Hickok's identity here, but without that the scene has even less effect on the rest of the story.
Given the alterations the film made to the structure of the novel, both the dual narrator conceit and the order of the stage coach / train scenes, this sequence probably should have been massively cut down, not given extra emphasis. As it stands, you could cut the entire stage coach ride and literally nothing would change in the rest of the film.
This sequence provides an interesting example of how a screenplay can get overruled by the rest of the filmmaking. On my first viewing, I was extremely confused by Hickok telling the coroner they had 3 bodies in the stage coach when they arrived in Fetterman. And on my second watch I realized why. When they stop to collect the horses and find the two bodies on the road, we only actually see one of them, and the driver's line that mentions the second man's name is delivered while the camera is focused on Hickok scanning the trees. The framing and the music make it clear that there's danger about so the viewer's attention is on that and the name "Pokerdeck Baker" doesn't make much of an impression.
And then to cap it off, they load Jim Hanlon in the coach, are shot at by Worm, and then just leave without picking up Baker's body. I'm not at all surprised I didn't have any idea who the third body was on a cold viewing. I suspect this problem wasn't in the screenplay, as the dialog does mention Baker, and Sale had experience both as a screenwriter and a director and presumedly understood cinematic language. Did they not shoot the part where Hickok loads Baker's body? Did they shoot it but it got dropped in the edit? If the latter, the editor should probably have also cut the line that mentioned his name, which wouldn't even have been difficult since it was offscreen.
(This is not important at all, but in the novel the two bodies are Jim Baker and Poke Hensley, not Jim Hanlon and Pokerdeck Baker. I wonder why they changed that, it's not like it matters.)
"More"
This film has some examples of the kind of "Can you make it...more?" that are perhaps inevitable in a Hollywood adaptation of a kind of introspective novel.
The most obvious instance of this is the shootout with Tom Custer's men in Cheyenne, another scene that I critiqued as weird and pointless in my first essay on the film.
This scene is not in the book, though the characters briefly talk about it in the Frozen Dog Tavern when Brady threatens to out Hickok's identity to Kileen. The conversation about the years ago event takes up less than a page, but in the film the shootout is put in the present and elevated to a full set piece, which necessitates another location and four or five speaking parts, none of which will ever be seen again. Also, it injects some timeline weirdness as this only happens two days before the Frozen Dog shootout so I'm not sure how the elder Kileen even knew any of this went down. And the ambush requires yet another character, and a rando at that, to instantly recognize Hickok, further emphasizing the pointlessness of the James Otis persona.
I can't really put my finger on why, but the scene felt really perfunctory, devoid of tension, and rushed, even on a first viewing, like a studio note said "insert action scene here, please" and they just kind of crapped one out.
Maybe Sale wrote it in of his own volition but given that, like the stage coach scene, it could be cut completely with absolutely no effect on the rest of the film, it at the very least it should have gotten cut in the edit. It is of absolutely no consequence to the characters or the plot. The film doesn't need another action scene, it has four more coming that are actually integrated with the story
Gallimaufry
The Wikipedia cast list for the film has this entry: "Ron Thompson as Frozen Dog Pimp" Imagine if you didn't know that Frozen Dog was the name of the tavern....
In the novel Worm is described as not very big, in contrast to his actor Will Sampson. Sampson at 6'7" is literally a foot taller than his book counterpart
The hilariously odd scene in the film where Hickok and Crazy Horse shout to each other in English while making huge over the top hand gestures, probably not surprisingly at this point, makes way more sense in the novel, where they are too far away from each other to speak and are just using sign language. The book also benefits from being a little fuzzy on what language the characters are speaking; both Hickok and Zane speak Lakota and i interpreted Hickok and Worm's conversations to be in that language.
There's a solid joke in both the novel and film when Zane asks Otis if he'd accept Zane's eyewitness account of the white buffalo and Otis replies "Depends what eye you saw him with." (Charlie has one glass eye.) Quite a bit of the dialog in the film, and pretty much all of the really good stuff, is right from the novel. Which is itself another interesting case study in how adaptations can go wrong, even if on the surface they are very "faithful."
After novel Otis wakes up in the stage coach with his guns in his hands, he stows them under his seat so he doesn't hurt anyone, saying "His nightmare had become dangerous." I laughed out loud reading this part as in the film Hickok doesn't seem to worry at all about how he keeps waking up emptying both barrels and James and I commented on that. As I said in my last piece: "every time Wild Bill got a new traveling companion, we were saying things like 'Before they all go to sleep, he's going to give them a heads up that this might happen, right? That sounds like basic courtesy.'" So it was really funny that our stupid joke actually was addressed in the book.
Speaking of shooting, in the book he only snaps off two shots on the train and the scene where he shoots at Jenny's fake white buffalo head makes way more sense. It's weird that they changed both of these things in the adaptation and made them goofier in the former case and sort of nonsensical in the latter.
I liked this exchange in the book:
"I was wondering why they were astir so early of a day," Otis said, watching the hill.
"Gold makes a good rooster," Mr. Pinkney said. (p19)
There's a couple of moments of odd perspective stuff in the novel that comes from the fairly close 3rd person narrator. There's a brief moment in the stage coach there the perspective shifts to Coxy for like a paragraph, which stood out in retrospect because the rest of the novel is pretty much only close in on Otis/Hickok and Worm. Also, when Otis meets Poker Jenny, the narration gives no indication that he already knows her, despite being in his perspective. If that scene had been from Jenny's perspective it might have worked as a mystery. This is all really subtle stuff and isn't remotely pervasive. There is some good ambiguity to be had here, too, like a scene where Hickok's dialog and the narrator are in conflict, which could be read as inner conflict within him, considering the closeness of the POV.
The novel makes the point that the Lakota are not supposed to speak or think of their dead. Worm becomes Worm because he couldn't let go of the dead, another parallel to Hickok who, sub-textually, is haunted by the dead in his past.
The film really nails the lonely, frigid isolation and stark beauty of the mountains that is described in the back end of the novel. And the nightmare, even with the strange choice to absent Hickok's physical presence from it, also really captures the atmosphere of it from the book.
In the novel, Hickok never finds out Worm's birth name. In the movie, he somehow intuits it and just says "You're Crazy Horse!" near the end. Which....ok? It's not a reveal, because the viewer found that out like 5 minutes into the film. It makes me wonder if the conversation with Worm's father was altered to immediately reveal his identity after the script was done, and this line is a remnant of an original draft where the viewer didn't know who Worm was. It probably should have been cut in the edit.
The film has a really confusing buffalo attack in the cave after Hickok and Worm talk. It's visually very unclear what's happening and doesn't add anything. It's not in the novel, which explains why it feels just stapled in, maybe another studio note. "There's been five whole minutes of talking, we need to add an action scene."
In the novel, Coxy is not shot by Worm after he's thrown out of the stage coach in the storm. as he is in the film The narration mentions the coach driver found his body a week later and he'd been hit by lighting when foolishly taking shelter under a tree. It's a much better choice.
In the novel, Worm spends a decent chunk of the early parts of his section with his friend He Dog, who was a real person and associate of Crazy Horse. I wonder how many of the book readers knew that and were able to figure out who Worm was. Was that an Easter Egg or a hint? I certainly wouldn't have picked up on it.
Conclusion
In my first piece on The White Buffalo, I commented rather wistfully that "I know I said I can't really recommend anyone watch this, but that doesn't mean I think it should be lost. ... Yes, this movie is bad. But failed art is still art."
The obscurity of a bad film was a point of poignance. The even greater obscurity of the source novel that is not only so much better than its adaptation but also legitimately compelling, makes me actively sad. The book is out of print. There's no ebook versions that i could find. James dug up my old battered copy on eBay.
Richard Sale died in 1993 at 81. He lived a long life and created a lot of art, writing short stories, novels, screenplays, and directing films. I don't think his work deserves to be forgotten.
I might try to find another one of Sale's novels and I think I'm going to watch the 1957 film Seven Days from Now, which is an adaptation of one of Sale's short stories that he both wrote and directed. It stars Tyrone Power and, from the little bit i've found about it, is apparently pretty good.
The novel was a gag gift that managed to become a real gift. So thank you, Mr. Sale, genuinely. Your work has brought me a lot of joy and given me a lot of opportunity to think about art.
And thank you James. These last [redacted] words are your fault.
-m
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