1
New Mexico Territory
“Fort Sumner comin’ up,” the driver called out, and banged his fist against the side of the stagecoach to make sure his sole passenger understood they’d arrived at their final destination.
This is the most arid and desolate place I’ve ever seen, thought Will Lee, the bewildered and increasingly more disappointed young passenger. How could Indians live in this god-forsaken desert? This isn’t what I expected.
The clay soil all around was red; what stunted crops or grass struggled to grow through the caked, cracked surface looked pale and desiccated. The sun was so hot ripples of heat radiated from the ground, and so bright just looking out dazzled the eye. As the coach passed by, Will had to squint to make out the series of low-slung buildings of the fort on his left. They appeared to be constructed of rough bricks made from that very red clay. Some of the buildings had overhanging roofs; most were square featureless blocks with few windows. There were trees growing here and there among the buildings, but the leaves were dry and dusty with the same red color.
On the other side of the road, obscured by a screen of brush and sparse-leafed trees—all also dusted with the red clay—was a wide and deeply washed riverbed. Through the trees, Will could occasionally see into the eroded terrain. The land looked dry and hot. There was no river, only a sluggish, shallow creek that wound back and forth across the floor of the riverbed, with a band of pale shrubbery along the water’s edge. On the other side there were figures moving around what looked like primitive mud huts. The Navajo. Will’s heart pounded.
He thought despondently about his dreams of escaping war-ravaged Virginia to find a heaven of peace and loving comradeship in the wide world out West.
Today was May 4, 1867, just two days after Will’s twenty-first birthday. He still had the delicate features of an adolescent, his face thin with high cheekbones and naturally pale skin. He had black curly hair and deep emerald-green eyes. The color was said to have come from his father’s father whose portrait hung over the homestead hearth. The unusually vivid color of Will’s eyes sometimes caused passersby to do a double take. Will never knew how to understand the attention. He wanted to think he was comely. His father, stern and stiff-necked, had once scolded him mercilessly for looking too long at his own reflection in a mirror. “Vain and self-willed,” his father, the Reverend Joshua Lee, had called him.
Though slender, Will’s physique was solid, his muscles well-defined, his shoulders square and strong from working the family farm. But his father, never satisfied, had always insisted that he slunk from the really hard work. He’d told him this every time he pulled out his whip and beat him on the backside. “To teach you the fear of God,” his father would say.
The handsome, but shy and easily intimidated-looking, young man was happy to have escaped his father’s authority, though now as he looked out of the stagecoach his idea of starting a fresh new life here seemed to be evaporating in front of his eyes like a pail of water sitting in this blazing sun. This sure doesn’t look like the Promised Land. It’s more like the back wasteland of hell.
He’d been remembering his preacher-father tell the story—with that grand oratorical pomposity Rev. Lee was famous for throughout Lynchburg and the surrounding counties—of Moses and the Israelites in the desert for forty years. Moses never found his own way into the Promised Land. I don’t guess I have any business comparing myself to Moses, but how am I ever going to make it to any promised land anywhere, much less lead anybody else to freedom?
Will reminded himself he wasn’t going to think about his father’s religion anymore or judge his own life according to that man’s way of thinking. I burned those bridges behind me. Now he would see his life the way that poet described in the book Harry Burnside had given him to read on the train. Mr. Burnside had told him to go discover the “wide world out there.” He’d said it’d be an adventure. He’d said there’d be loving comrades out there for Will to meet. He’d made it sound so simple.
“Wide world.” Those had been the same words his friend Michael used. “Let’s escape,” Michael had said. “There’s a wide world just a’waitin’ out there for us.” Will’s heart ached at the recollection of Michael.
They were going to go on that adventure together. Now Will wondered where Michael was. Had he made it to Norfolk harbor? Was he a seaman now, out sailing the ocean blue, on his way to ports exotic and unknown with comrades by his side? Or had his journey taken as unexpected a turn as Will’s?
Will felt as lonesome as he ever had in his life.
This isn’t much of a wide world. Has there been a mistake? Mr. Burnside’s friend in Washington said Fort Sumner was built to protect the Navajos and give them a home. Who’d want to live in this desolation? What kind of protection could a place like this offer? And from what?
As the stagecoach had approached Fort Sumner and the Bosque Redondo Reservation, in the distance Will had seen Indians tilling the desiccated soil under the supervision of armed soldiers. Closer by, he’d noticed another group making mud bricks, also under the close watch of blue uniforms. That’s what had got him thinking of the story of Moses. Moses freed slaves who were making mud bricks, hadn’t he? That’s what the blue uniforms are supposed to stand for: freeing slaves. Will thought contemptuously about the war that had dominated his life back home. Blue vs. Gray. What a hornswoggle! These Union bluebellies look just like slave overseers.
The coach pulled up in front of a building that bore a sign in military stenciling: “Sutler’s Store.” Standing in the shade of the overhanging roof were blue-uniformed soldiers surrounded by a crowd of brown-skinned men and women dressed in rawhide or else in tattered cotton clothes that looked like white men’s hand-me-downs.
The young Virginian had expected the Indians to appear fierce and threatening, but these poor wretches who toiled under the soldier’s watch or stood around the store looked beaten down and dispirited, less like recipients of the government’s altruism and largesse and more like its slaves—though brown-skinned now, not black. Could this be a prison and not the reservation, after all? Will had imagined lush mountains and babbling brooks with encampments of clean white tepees that glistened in the sun. That was how his childhood picture books had shown Indian villages. Maybe the reservation is somewhere else.
The air was dry and dusty, full of gnats and insects that swarmed in his eyes and nose as he climbed down out of the stagecoach. He wondered where he was supposed to go. Is this the right place?
Will’s confusion—and hope for some alternative—ended when a uniformed soldier approached. “You the new Injun Agent?”
“Good afternoon. I’m William Lee. I’ve been appointed apprentice to the Agent at Fort Sumner.” He extended his hand. Though wind-beaten and sunburned, this soldier reminded him of the draft officer for the Virginia Militia whom he’d served under back in Lynchburg. That man had been a good soldier, a handsome gentleman and a kindly benefactor to Will. He hoped this fellow would prove to be of the same caliber.
“Sergeant J.F. Peak, aide to General James Carleton.” The soldier looked at his hand with disdain and gave a cursory salute. “Welcome to Fort Sumner and the beautiful Bosque Redondo Reservation,” he added with obvious sarcasm.
“Is this really the reservation?”
“You got any complaints?”
“I just meant I thought maybe there might be someplace else, well, more hospitable for the Indians.”
“Jezzuz,” Peak sighed. “Look, Gen’rl Carleton wants to meet you right away. C’mon. Where’s your baggage?”
“This is all I’ve got.” Will held out his single carpetbag.
“I ain’t no bellboy,” Peak sneered. “You want a redskin to carry y’r damn bag?” He turned away without waiting for an answer and headed toward the main group of buildings which Will could see on the other side of a low wall.
“By the way,” Peak called over his shoulder, “the last Agent’s gone, ain’t nobody here for you to apprentice to. You’re Agent now. I hope you’re gonna be a damn sight better than that last.” He said only partly to Will, “You Injun Agents’re just a nuisance ’round here,” as he walked on.
Gone? What does that mean? Three days ago on the train Will would have imagined that meant the previous Agent had retired a successful man and gone into ranching on the verdant prairie. But as he looked around at the unwelcoming and uncompromising terrain he’d now arrived in, he began to worry that maybe that last Agent died of thirst out there in the desert or, worse, been scalped by Indians. This isn’t what I expected at all.
On the other hand, of course, he’d just gotten a promotion!
“Gone?” Will called out to Sgt. Peak, but the soldier had strode out of hearing range and did not answer.
As Will hurried to catch up with him, the sergeant pointed out a solitary wooden structure far from the other buildings, “That’ll be your quarters out there.”
“Want me to take my things over?”
“You deef or somethin’? I said we was goin’ to go see Gen’rl Carleton. Ain’t you listenin’ to nothin’?”
As they entered the compound formed by a short wall of adobe brick, they came upon a commotion. Chained to the wall were five Indians, three of them bare-chested, Will observed with a flutter in his belly. They looked strong, but starved. One of them, with his arms twisted in the chains, appeared to have just fallen or been knocked to the ground; he hung painfully from the shackles.
“God damn it,” a soldier standing over the man shouted angrily. “You tryin’ to trip me or somethin’?” He punched the Indian in the midsection.
Will felt called upon to exercise his office as Indian Agent. He wondered if this was a test to see how he’d acquit himself in this new job. “What’s happening here, soldier?”
The uniformed man looked around, saw Will and flashed a smile, but addressed Sgt. Peak. “Oh, Sarge, it’s you. Why this damn Injun stuck his foot out as I was walkin’ by. I thought I’d better teach him a lesson.” He laughed.
“That’s okay, Mac. As you were,” Peak said. “I thought you was on scout duty.”
As the jaunty young man came toward them, Will spoke up, “I’m the new Indian Agent, soldier. Tell me, how come these Indians are in chains?”
“Bein’ punished for tryin’ to escape,” Peak answered curtly. “This here’s Private Timothy McCarrie.” He seemed to resent having to make the introduction. “And this is William Lee. Like he said, he’s the new Agent.”
“Everybody just calls me Mac.” Pvt. McCarrie was a rangy redhead. He had a tall feather stuck in the leather strap of his union kepi; he wore the blue wool military cap with black visor pushed back on his head so bright copper curls framed his face, accentuating a splash of freckles, wry grin and sparkling eyes. Though Will was put off by his treatment of the chained Indian, he couldn’t help finding the man’s features appealing.
The soldier nodded to Will, then began to explain to Sgt. Peak why he wasn’t on scout duty. Will was left standing by himself. This is Army business, none of my concern.
He noticed a young Indian woman had come over to attend to the men in chains. She wore a long dress woven with complex designs in rich earthen colors. A leather bucket hung from her shoulder. When McCarrie walked over to Peak, the woman rushed to the man who’d been kicked and punched to offer him a drink of water scooped from her bucket with a drinking gourd. She placed a hand tenderly on the back of his neck to comfort him.
Will was entranced. Something about her was just immediately attractive to him. The Indian’s oval-shaped face with deep-set eyes was gaunt. She, too, appeared starved. But her complexion was clear, and her rich brown skin glowed. In her eyes Will imagined that untamed wildness he’d been expecting among the Indians. But her gesture seemed so sensitive and considerate. Her long black hair lay over her shoulders and hung, untied, to the middle of her back. She looked to Will to be about his own age, maybe a little older. For a woman, she seemed tall, her shoulders broad and square.
Will stood watching. One of the men in chains, pointing at him, called out “Has-bah” to her.
Alerted, she turned and looked straight at Will. For a moment, her dark brown eyes locked on his. He smiled and nodded, thinking—hoping—she’d return his sign of salutation. But instead a glare of hate struck back at him like a physical blow. He’d been excited that he’d seen the humanity in this Navajo woman. Her reaction made him quail.
Pvt. McCarrie seemed to notice Will’s bewilderment. “The Navajos don’t much like to be looked at in the eye. They consider it disrespectful. Better watch yourself, sir—” He grinned at Will and winked, “—if you want to make friends with the lady.”
“Thanks for the advice,” Will said, grateful McCarrie had sensed his hurt feelings and grateful for the knowing wink—whatever it meant. At least somebody saw I was trying to be friendly. Will felt a surge of pride that McCarrie thought he wanted to make friends with the lady.
After Peak dismissed the private, Will followed obediently as they passed through the fort. He could see the strength of the Union Army—rifles and cannons and soldiers—all arrayed to control the Indians. That Indian woman Has-bah doesn’t realize I’m not like the rest of them. She doesn’t know what brought me out here.
In the middle of Fort Sumner, framed by buildings on all four sides, was a rectangular parade grounds. At the near end, a flagpole flew the Stars and Stripes. At the far end a gallows stood. The three limp-hanging nooses reminded Will of the incident in front of his father’s churchhouse. He shuddered and forcefully pushed the memory away.