“AFTER THAT SKIRMISH WITH the Bluecoat horse soldiers,” Dane said, “the Cheyennes looked upon Pleasant as a young man of strong medicine. They called him Iron Shirt, and he became a Dog Soldier, a high honor for one so young. But he didn’t seem to want to be singled out. He preferred to be alone much of the time, brooding and wondering to himself if he were an Indian or a white man. He gave the coat of mail to Sweet Medicine Woman to keep for him. Sometimes he would ask for it to clean rust specks off the metal, and then he would tell her to put it away again. Often at night in our tipi I would be awakened by moans and cries of fright from Pleasant’s bed and I knew he was having terrible visions in his dreams.
“One day I was down on a sandbar with Swift Eagle and Little Cloud, telling them Cherokee ghost stories. I had taught both of them how to write their names in English, as well as a few English words, and while I was telling a story Swift Eagle took a stick and scratched his name in the sand. He then made a drawing of the wolf I was telling about and wrote W-o-l-f under it.
“ ‘He can write words!’ Pleasant cried out behind us. He had crept down to the riverbank so silently that I did not know he was there. Lean Bear taught him how to do that.
“ ‘I can write my name, too,’ Little Cloud boasted, pulling at his brother’s stick.
“ ‘Why is it that you never showed me how to write?’ Pleasant asked in a tone of reproach.
“ ‘Surely you can read and write,’ I said.
“ ‘Jerusha taught me how to pen my name.’
“ ‘You never had any schooling in the Nation?’
“He shook his head. ‘Reverend Crookes said words to me to put in my memory. But not to read or write.’ He shrugged. ‘What use has an Indian for such things!’ He jumped down on the sandbar, dragging a moccasin across the letters that Swift Eagle had made, erasing them.
“ ‘I’ll teach you how to write words,’ I said, but he was already running away down the riverbank.
Another time not long after that, I found him brooding on a hilltop, facing toward the east, his face sad and dreary like an old man’s.
“ ‘How far is the Nation, how many days’ travel?’ he asked.
“ ‘Are you sick for home?’ I said.
“ ‘I want to see my mother, Jerusha, again,’ he replied. ‘I want to be a white man instead of an Indian.’
“ ‘You could go to the seminary at Tahlequah,’ I suggested. ‘They can teach you to live as a white man.’
“I was surprised at his eager response. He wanted to start that very day.
“In spite of Sweet Medicine Woman’s earnest objections, Pleasant and I were on our way the next morning. During the days of the Drying-Up Moon that we spent together on trails to the Indian Territory, I came to truly know my half-blood son for the first time. The only other people we talked with while going there were our relatives at Fort Carrothers. The night we stopped at the trading post we changed to white man’s clothes and I made an arrangement with Jotham so that I could use buffalo skins to pay for Pleasant’s schooling in the Cherokee Nation.
“There is nothing like close travel with one companion to bring out strengths and weaknesses that may be overlooked in ordinary living. I soon discovered that Pleasant’s reckless ways were only a mask for his fears. He talked once about the charge he made against the soldiers so they would empty their guns, confessing that he could never have done that without the coat of mail which was a mask over his fears. He still had terrible dreams about that, he said, feeling in his own flesh the bullets that penetrated the flesh of his shield, the Appaloosa.
“Day by day as we moved southward his spirits brightened, and when we rode into Tahlequah, he was almost singing with gladness. We soon found Mr. Ebenezer Keys’s Seminary for Young Males, and I enrolled Pleasant for the coming year. Mr. Keys was a friendly little man from New England, and he promised me that Pleasant would receive the best instruction in reading, spelling, arithmetic, and geography, to be taught both in Cherokee and English.
“The next day Pleasant and I rode out to the crossroads to see Jerusha. She had no knowledge that we were in the Nation, and was almost overcome with surprise and joy. She embarrassed her eighteen-year-old son with hugs and kisses, treating him like a long-lost child. The solemn Reverend Crookes had little to say to us, and I soon left Pleasant there to spend the night while I went over to stay with William and Tatsuwha. William was beginning to show his age. He had turned fifty years and was quite reserved of manner, but he was hospitable and wanted to know everything I could tell him about Jotham and Griffa and the Fort Carrothers trading post.
“That evening in the moonlight I walked over to the burying ground to visit Creek Mary’s grave. The churchyard was filled with wagons and buggies, and the high-pitched voice of Reverend Crookes rang from the open windows of the church, warning of the hand of death, the grim messenger of God, the scourge of strong drink, and the wickedness that desolated the Cherokee Nation.
“I was standing under a walnut tree that overlooked the simple cedar marker of Akusa Amayi when I was startled by a figure in white, flitting along, avoiding patches of moonlight to keep within the shadows. For a moment I thought this was a ghost, but then I knew it was Jerusha. She stopped close beside me, breathing hard. ‘I saw you from the church window,’ she said. ‘When he kneeled to pray I slipped out. I can stay only a minute.’ She sucked in a deep breath. ‘I want to thank you for bringing Pleasant back to me. He is all that I can have of you.’
“I did not know what to say, so I reached out and took her hand, and then she moved against me, her arms tightening around me, her lips warm against my cheek, her whole body pressing against me so that I could feel the thinness of her legs. She shivered then and drew away quickly, running toward the church. As I have said, I believe Jerusha’s feelings went beyond the limits of the heart.
“For her I felt a great tenderness, and on my lonely journey back to Fort Carrothers my thoughts were much on Jerusha and our son Pleasant. I had grown attached to the boy. There was a frailty in both of them, a constant searching for strength to draw upon. To survive, the weak must feed on the hearts of the strong.
“More than three years passed before I saw Pleasant again. After he learned to write, he would scrawl short letters to me, sending them by the stagecoach mail to Fort Carrothers. I would pick them up whenever I stopped at Jotham’s place, sometimes months after they were written, and I answered every one.
“Within him seethed a pitiless conflict between his Indian and white blood, and after reading his letters I often recalled the night with Saviah Manning when she told me of how she and Jotham were much alike, their white blood contesting with the Indian in them. Yet Jotham seemed to have made peace with himself. He was more white than Indian, the passing travelers often asking him if he were Portuguese or Spanish or of some other dark-skinned race, seldom suspecting that this post trader in white man’s clothing, speaking their language as well as they, was a half-blood of the native peoples they feared or despised.
“After Pleasant left the school, he worked awhile for Mr. Tim Rogers, but he found blacksmithing tiresome and tried to make his way by hunting and trapping in the Boston Mountains over in Arkansas. I remember well the last letter I received from him. ‘My means are failing,’ he wrote. ‘My relatives are poor. I have no means of profitably employing my time. To disperse care and trouble, I have turned to drinking whiskey.’
“A few weeks after that Pleasant suddenly appeared at Fort Carrothers. He arrived on one of the Overland Mail stagecoaches that had begun making daily stops at the trading post on regular runs over the trail to California. Jotham and Bibbs begged him to stay and help with the blacksmithing, but after a day or so he joined me and my family in our tipi at the Ghost Timbers. He discarded his ill-fitting black broadcloth for buckskins, and when we started north Pleasant was with us, his mind firmly made up to follow the ways of the Cheyennes.
“That summer he married one of Magpie Eagle’s nieces, a pretty girl named Rising Fawn, and his pathway might have been smooth had it not been for one thing—the craving for whiskey that had begun to afflict him while he was in the Indian Territory. In the old days he could have fought it down, would have had to fight it down, but by this time white men were bringing whiskey on the trails in wagons, setting up whiskey stores on wheels, and moving to some other place after trading to Indians who could not obtain strong drink at the licensed trading posts.
“Whenever Pleasant had buffalo skins to trade, he would seek out a whiskey wagon and come back to camp so drunk he could not stand on his feet. One evening he challenged me in front of our tipi, raging at me, blaming me because I had fathered him from a white woman so that he was neither an Indian nor a white man. The more I tried to soothe him the angrier he became, frightening Sweet Medicine Woman with his threats to kill me for creating him. At last in one of his rages he fell senseless upon the ground, and I carried him to Rising Fawn, who cried over him through the night.
“Some days afterward in that same summer, Pleasant and three of his friends, all Dog Soldiers, were hunting for black-tailed deer along the upper Platte when they came in sight of the Oregon Trail bridge crossing. They were in territory where they were forbidden to hunt, and should not have been there, but they had drunk some whiskey, so they had more recklessness about them than good sense. From the hill where they stopped they could see the bridge and the stockade at one end in which the soldiers lived. At the other end of the bridge grazed a small herd of picketed horses, with one soldier guarding them.
“ ‘Look,’ Pleasant said, ‘those soldiers down there are the ones who killed Sata after we raided the Shoeshones with Lean Bear. They owe us three horses.’
“He and his companions talked about this for a while. Most likely none of the soldiers were the same ones who had been there three years before, and they probably knew nothing about Sata and the horses. Also there were two or three times as many soldiers in the stockade as those they had chased that day near Poison Spider Creek, and there were only four Dog Soldiers now. Yet they foolishly decided to rush down upon the herd, shoot the guard, and capture three U.S. horses.
“Because the soldiers were not expecting such a foolhardy raid, the four Dog Soldiers got away with three horses, leaving the scalped guard behind. However, Pleasant and his companions had hardly crossed the hills when a bunch of mounted Bluecoats came swarming after them. The first that we in our camp knew about this was the clatter of hooves and the sight of the four Dog Soldiers galloping into our midst. ‘Bluecoats coming!’ one of them shouted, and of course we all started helping the women and children run to cover. There was no time to dismantle tipis or pack anything. We hurried to arm ourselves with whatever we could get our hands on—guns, bows, lances, clubs, knives. While we were doing these things the soldiers set fire to some high dry grass on the slope above the camp, and a strong wind swept clouds of black smoke down upon us.
“Out of this smoke the soldiers charged us with drawn sabers, yelling furiously. Some carried burning sheafs of grass which they tossed on our tipis. Others dismounted and used our own campfires to set bedding and robes and tipis to blazing. Those who kept to their saddles struck down with their sabers anyone they came within reach of—children, women, old people.
“Because of the suddenness of their attack, we barely had time to strike back before they were gone, taking many of our horses with them. I’m sure I shot one soldier in the leg with my carbine. He was grimacing and squeezing the fleshy part of his thigh as he galloped away from me. And then I saw another dash by with an arrow deep in his shoulder. They suffered some punishment, but we suffered far more.
“Luckily for my family, we were camped at the farther end of the village from where the soldiers came in. Sweet Medicine Woman had time to get our four children into some thick brush along the river, and no damage was done to our tipi. For others it was worse. The young son of my brother-in-law, Yellow Hawk, received a bad saber cut on one arm, and we had great difficulty in stopping the flow of blood. Yellow Hawk and his wife, and several other families who were camped upstream lost their tipis and most of their buffalo robes, saddles, and parfleches to fire.
“As soon as Big Star was certain the soldiers had gone back to the bridge station, he called a council. We learned that we had lost two to death. One was a member of the Crooked Lance society who had tried to stop a soldier from setting fire to his tipi and was shot dead. The other was my dear old friend Whistling Elk, who had given me his medicine pouch for my raid against the Crows with the Fox Soldiers. Whistling Elk burned to death in his tipi, being too feeble to crawl out and escape.
“Lean Bear brought Pleasant and the three other Dog Soldiers to the council and ordered them to explain why the Bluecoats had chased them and then attacked our village so fiercely. After they told their stories, Lean Bear denounced them for being so foolish and offered them to Big Star for punishment. Big Star, however, would not punish them. ‘Many moons ago my blood was hot, as theirs is hot because of their youth,’ he said. ‘The trouble came to us because of the soldiers. If the soldiers were not in our country, such things would not happen. We must move away from the Veheos and their bluecoated pony soldiers. Last winter when Black Kettle’s people camped near us in the Hinta Nagi, he told me that buffalo had come back to the valley of the Smoking Land River, more than enough buffalo for all our people. That country in the south was given to the Cheyennes in the Big Treaty. Before the sun goes down, let us strike our tipis and turn our faces to the south.’
“Although the soldiers had taken many of our best horses, we also had lost much to the fires. By crowding the travois that we had horses to draw, we were able to pack almost everything we had left. We built burial scaffolds and mourned for the two men who died, and then we started southward.
“Twice along the way we were stopped by Bluecoat cavalrymen who patrolled the Plains as if we had no right to be there on land that belonged to us. They wanted to know where we came from and where we were going. But after we passed Beaver Fork of the Lower Platte we saw no more Veheos, and we found the valley of the Smoking Land River rich in buffalo, as Black Kettle had promised.
“Many things happened very fast after that summer we moved south. I’ve always blamed Jotham for some of our troubles, although they would have come later anyway. At his trading post Jotham kept hearing rumors of gold being found in the mountains of what is now Colorado. A passing stranger once showed him a pouch of gold dust he said he’d found somewhere in those mountains. Jotham wrote about that in a letter to William, and William spread the story around among his friends, some of whom had prospected for gold at Dahlonega in Georgia before the Georgians drove them away.
“A Cherokee—especially a half-blood Cherokee—can get gold fever as bad as a white man, and it wasn’t long before six or seven men from the Cherokee Nation showed up at Fort Carrothers, wanting Jotham to show them the way to a second Yellow Metal, or Dahlonega. Jotham had no more idea where the gold was than they did, but he caught a bad case of the fever and went with them into the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. They spent most of the summer wandering from one creek to another, finding just enough traces of gold to keep them searching. Whenever Jotham found a little gold dust, he would pack it into a goose quill. After the Cherokees gave up prospecting and went home to the Indian Territory, Jotham brought several of those quills back to Fort Carrothers. There wasn’t enough gold in all of them to buy a used-up saddle.
“I don’t say that Jotham started that whole Pike’s Peak or Bust madness that came near destroying us a year or so later, but he showed off his gold-dust quills to many a passing traveler, putting the thought of Rocky Mountain gold into their heads. And in time, so many prospectors went into the mountains that some of them made big strikes.
“When he’d show off his quills, Jotham bragged about the big strike he was going to make the next time he went into the mountains, but he never went again. Griffa wouldn’t allow it. She said if he left her to run that trading post by herself for another summer she’d leave and go back to the Cherokee Nation. Jotham didn’t do any more prospecting, but it seemed like every white man and boy in the East all decided at the same time to cross the Plains and dig for gold in the Rocky Mountains.
“On foot, on mules and horses, in wagons and stagecoaches, they were clogging up the Oregon Trail before we left the Timbers in the springtime to go down to the Smoking Land River again. And we’d hardly camped there before gold hunters were coming right up our valley, beating out trails in old wagons that weren’t fit to travel. All of them had signs lettered on the sides, pike’s peak or bust. Some days they were like a ragged army on horseback, slaughtering our buffalo by the hundreds to eat only the choicest parts, leaving the carcasses to rot on the ground. The skies soon filled with carrion birds, and then the buffalo deserted us, swinging south toward the Arkansas River.
“Lean Bear was the first to turn his anger to action. He told Big Star he was going to take his Dog Soldiers down this new trail from the east and keep the crazy white men away from the Smoking Land Valley, frighten them back to the trails along the Platte, and then maybe our buffalo would return. Big Star cautioned him to beware of soldiers; he had heard of many forts being built to the east.
“Pleasant wore his coat of mail the morning he rode out with the Dog Soldiers, and I wondered if I would ever see him or any of the other warriors again. For a few days, no white men appeared in any direction, but then they began to come again. Lean Bear told me that it was like trying to stop a river with bare hands. At first he tried not to kill any white men, only to frighten them, but then the whites would shoot at the Dog Soldiers and the Dog Soldiers would shoot back. Soon the Bluecoats from the forts were chasing them, and the Dog Soldiers had to move far off in some other direction. They went all the way to the Santa Fe Trail, and began raiding stage stations and ranch houses.
“The Drying-Grass Moon came and went, but the Dog Soldiers did not return to the Smoking Land River, and Big Star said that without buffalo to hunt we could stay there no longer. We would return early to the Hinta Nagi. Perhaps the herds would come there with the snows.
“When we first sighted the Ghost Timbers, we thought a whirling storm must have struck our old winter shelter while we were gone. But we soon discovered that white men wanting firewood had crossed the shallow Platte to kill our trees the way they killed our buffalo, chopping down our windbreaks and using only the limbs to burn. They had camped in many places in the Timbers, fouling the earth and water with their leavings. There, for the first time, we sensed that we were losing control of our lives. We were outcasts, doomed to flight or entrapment. We had no safe place to go. But we cleaned up what was left of the old Hinta Nagi, determined to spend one more winter there.
“When I went over to Fort Carrothers to see Jotham, he showed me a newspaper from St. Louis with an account of Indian raids along the Kansas trails. The worst of these savages, the newspaper said, was a band of Cheyenne Dog Soldiers led by a half-breed in Spanish armor, who attacked helpless travelers without warning, shooting and hacking and torturing their victims without mercy. ‘The man in the armor is bound to be Pleasant,’ Jotham said. ‘We ought to go find him and stop him before it’s too late.’
“Well, I thought the newspaper account was like most printed things about Indians, exaggerated lies, and besides we had no way of finding Pleasant. As it turned out, we did not have to go looking for him. He showed up one day at the Ghost Timbers, worn down to nothing but bone and muscle, his skin blackened by the sun, wearing his coat of mail and a dirty old rabbit-skin cap. He was carrying a lance to which were attached four scalps, none of them dark enough to be Indian. All he would say about the Dog Soldiers, who were still on the Plains, was that he had a quarrel with Lean Bear and he was tired of raiding and scalping. Red Bird Woman may have learned more than that from Pleasant, but if she did she never told me. Lean Bear came in with the Dog Soldiers a few weeks later, leading many captured horses loaded with plunder, but Pleasant was gone by that time and Lean Bear never said anything to me about a quarrel, so it probably didn’t amount to much.
“Pleasant tried to settle down in Rising Fawn’s tipi, but he was like a burned-out spirit, too restless to loaf around the Ghost Timbers waiting for winter buffalo that never came. He kept going back and forth from the Timbers to Fort Carrothers, and he was there one day when a man arrived from Missouri to talk with Jotham about building a station for what he called the Pony Express. This man had a contract to carry mail by horseback from Leavenworth to California. When he asked if there was someone at the fort willing to be the station keeper, Jotham pointed to Pleasant. ‘He’s your man. Knows how to handle horses, a good blacksmith, and can read, write, and figure.’
“ ‘I’ll hire you,’ the man said to Pleasant, ‘but not as a station keeper. You’re young, skinny, and wiry. I want you for one of my riders.’
“And that’s how my son Pleasant McAlpin became a Pony Express rider on the section between Fort Carrothers and Fort Laramie. I believe those were the happiest days of the boy’s life, riding fast and free, dressed in a red shirt and blue trousers and high boots, and carrying that fancy saddlebag full of important mail. He was the envy of my second son, Swift Eagle, and of Jotham’s Young Opothle, both of whom were old enough to be riders. But Swift Eagle was too Indian to suit the Pony Express men, and Young Opothle was too heavy.
“Young Opothle was so upset over being turned down that I persuaded Jotham to let him go off with us that summer to hunt for buffalo on the Little Fork of the Hotoa. Rising Fawn also went along. She had an even greater dislike for living at Fort Carrothers than did Sweet Medicine Woman.”