IN SPRING OF THE YEAR 1851 AN EXCITING RUMOR SPREAD across the western plains. Comparing partial information, men convinced themselves that portentous things were afoot.
The rumor started in Washington and moved swiftly out to St. Louis, where it was further augmented. By the time it reached St. Joseph it was raging like a prairie fire, and the farther westward it went, the more alluring it became.
“Yessir,” a mountain man affirmed at the Pawnee village, “the U.S. gov’mint is finally gonna grasp the bull by the horns.”
“And do what?” a suspicious trapper from Minnesota asked.
“We’re gonna have a great meeting … all the tribes on the plains … and we’re gonna settle once and for all who owns what.”
A chief of the Pawnee, hearing this heady talk, asked, “Great White Father, he come? Make peace?”
“He wouldn’t come hisself,” the mountain man explained, “but he would sure send his commissioners and Indian agents. It’s gonna be peace.”
The news sped along the Platte as fast as men could ride, and nowhere did it create more commotion than at Fort Laramie, where a small detachment of one hundred and sixty soldiers under tall, prim Captain William Ketchum, accepted responsibility for the safety of an empire. A trader bringing in six wagons of goods for Mr. Tutt, who ran the sutler’s store, reported, “I heard for sure it’s gonna happen. Mebbe two hundred, three hundred Indians brought to this fort—right here—for one great powwow.”
“We couldn’t handle three hundred Indians,” Ketchum protested. “Look at us!” He pointed to one of America’s most curious military establishments: within a curving sweep made by the Laramie River stood an old adobe fort long used by fur traders and emigrants. Since it was obviously inadequate and probably indefensible, new buildings were being erected along the sides of an impressive parade ground, but at this moment only two were in operation—the sutler’s store at the far end and the residential building, a two-storied plantation affair that looked as though it belonged in Virginia. Ultimately, plans called for a palisade to enclose the area, with two tall towers at the diagonal, but it certainly did not exist now, a fact of which Captain Ketchum was painfully aware. Pointing once more to the empty, unprotected space, he complained, “We could not defend ourselves. It would be a massacre.”
“Well,” the trader said enthusiastically, “here’s where they meet. Three hundred of ’em. Gonna settle all territorial claims. Peace for all time is what Washington wants.” And with this he led his wagons to the sutler’s, where the long-needed goods were unloaded.
Captain Ketchum was worried. Sending his orderly to fetch Joe Strunk, long-time mountain man serving as guide and interpreter, the captain said with some bitterness, “Word from St. Louis is that three hundred Indians will be convening here … peace treaty of some kind.” Obviously he did not relish the idea.
“They’d overrun us,” Strunk protested. When he had first heard that the United States was building a fort at Laramie he was pleased. It would help police the various trails that were beginning to crisscross the west. But if the government wanted a real fort in this territory, with no support for six hundred miles, it ought to be a protected fort, not a large open space.
“If the redskins got started, it could be a massacre,” he said dolefully.
“My very words!” Ketchum said.
“They been talkin’ peace for the last ten years,” Strunk observed, “and we got more war across the prairies now than ever before.”
This was not correct. In the middle years of the nineteenth century more than 350,000 emigrants moved along the Platte River from the Missouri to the Pacific, and the bulk passed through Indian lands without encountering difficulty. Something less than one-tenth of one percent of the travelers were slain by Indians—fewer than three hundred—whereas many times that number were killed by their own rifles, or the rifles of friends fired accidentally, or the gunplay of criminals who had joined the procession.
There have been few mass migrations in history so peaceful, and no previous instance in which people of one race passed through lands held by another with such trivial inconvenience. For this good record the Indian was mostly responsible, for it was his willingness to abide the white man that allowed the two groups to coexist in such harmony.
“What we got,” Strunk explained, “is petty warfare. Crow against Sioux. Shoshone against Cheyenne.”
“And we also have Broken Thumb,” Ketchum said with some distaste as he pointed to a tall, rangy Cheyenne in his mid-thirties who lounged insolently outside the gates of the old fort. “Broken Thumb!” he called. “Come over here.”
Slowly the chief detached himself from the Indians with whom he had been talking and very slowly walked the considerable distance from the adobe fort to the new white building. He moved as if he were coming to a fight, a scowl marking his broad, dark face, a gun cradled in his arms. Among the tribes he was a disrupting influence, for he was burdened with a bitter knowledge: he understood what was happening to his people in an age of change.
When he had approached near enough for Ketchum and Strunk to see the contorted right hand from which he took his name, he uttered one word in Cheyenne, “What?”
“Great White Father says he wants peace,” Strunk said in the same language. “You want peace?”
Broken Thumb stared at the mountain man, then at the captain, and waved his right hand. It had been crushed when he fell under the wheels of an emigrant wagon while stealing food. “What is it you call peace?” he asked. “You give us firewater to drink, and we become a nation of foolish men.” Here he danced a few steps, imitating a drunken Indian. “And while we are drunk you take our women and drive away our buffalo. Once they were more plentiful than our ponies … here where the two rivers meet … now where have they gone?”
“Two years ago you brought in thirteen thousand robes,” Strunk reminded him. “Mr. Tutt gave you many goods—scarlet cloth, beads, looking glasses, that gun you have.” He snatched it to point out the mark on the stock.
Broken Thumb grabbed the gun back and said harshly, “And this year, what robes? Where have the buffalo hidden? Like us, they cannot stand the white man’s ways and have left their old grounds.”
When this was translated, Ketchum assured him, “They’ll come back. I’ve seen a hundred thousand buffalo along this river, and we’ll see them again.”
“If we could have peace,” Strunk asked, “would you want it?”
For a moment the Cheyenne’s broad face relaxed, and he looked at his two interrogators with the eyes of a man willing to negotiate difficult matters. “We can have peace,” he said quietly, “if the commissioners come here like men and settle the four big problems …” The amiability vanished and he growled, “But the commissioners never come. Only soldiers. Only fighting.”
“Ask him … suppose the commissioners really did come? What four problems?”
Broken Thumb considered for a moment and concluded that he was being subjected to a trick. For years the Indians had sought a meeting with the Great White Father, one where they could smoke the calumet and talk about the prairies and the buffalo and the roads that crossed their lands. They no longer had hope that such a meeting could be arranged. And now Broken Thumb turned abruptly away. “No more talk,” he said in English. With that he strode from the fort, mounted his pony and splashed his way across the Laramie River toward the area where his tribe was encamped.
Then, in early summer, real news reverberated from the Missouri to the Rockies: “Yessir, a huge assembly of chiefs at Fort Laramie. End of August. All questions to be settled.”
Trappers employed by Pierre Chouteau and Company in St. Louis, lean hard-bitten men who dressed like Indians and fought them when necessary, penetrated to the Pawnee, the Cheyenne, the Arapaho, the Comanche and the Kiowa with the reassuring news: “Great White Father sends greetings. You come to powwow, he bring many presents.”
To the northern tribes that clustered along the Missouri—the Mandan, the Hidatsa, the Arikara—went a remarkable emissary, one of the bravest men to operate throughout the region, Pierre Jean De Smet, a Jesuit priest from Belgium, whose word was accepted by all the tribes. “It will be a famous gathering,” he told them in the many languages he knew. “The Great Father is sending rich presents, and if you come to Fort Laramie, all things that worry you will be settled.” It was largely due to his persuasiveness that the northern tribes began to weigh the unlikely possibility that real peace might be at hand.
To the fort at Laramie came the most reassuring messenger of all, a major in the United States Army serving as Indian agent with specific powers to set the vast operation in motion. He arrived one July morning, accompanied by seven cavalrymen and a charming woman in her thirties, all of whom had ridden hard from St. Joseph.
“Great news!” the major called before dismounting at the entrance to the fort. “A treaty to be signed!” When he got off his horse the soldiers at the fort saw that he limped noticeably in his left leg and they judged that this was not the result of some temporary soreness but a permanent thing.
Captain Ketchum came out to greet the arrivals, but before amenities could be concluded, the major cried, “It’s done, Captain! The treaty’s to be signed here.”
“What’s this about a treaty?” Ketchum asked.
“Supreme Court says the Indian tribes are nations. With nations you have treaties.”
Ketchum frowned and asked, “How many extra soldiers will they send me?”
“Cheer up! There’s talk of a thousand new men. Twenty-seven wagons of gifts for the tribes. Two commissioners and God knows how many interpreters.”
“How many Indians are we to expect?”
“Depends on what luck Father De Smet has. Could go as high as six hundred.”
“We’ll need more than a thousand extra soldiers,” Ketchum began. Then, realizing how rude he was being, he said, “I haven’t welcomed this charming lady to our fort.”
“My wife, Lisette Mercy.”
Before the captain could reply, Lisette had dismounted and grasped him by the hand. “Think nothing of ignoring me.” She laughed. “Maxwell’s always that way.” And she moved graciously onto the porch of the new building. “Shall we be staying here?” she asked.
“Yes,” the captain stammered. “We’ll …”
“Good!” And with that she returned to her horse and started unpacking her gear.
“Give the lady a hand,” Ketchum called, but before any of his men could reach her, she had her small bags unfastened and on the ground.
“I shall love it here,” she said enthusiastically. “I can see the Indians, now, hundreds of them … on all those hills.”
This was a most unfortunate image, and Captain Ketchum winced. He did not relish the touchy prospect of having six hundred Indian braves on those hills when he might have only two companies of dragoons and one of infantry to defend the place, protect the incoming caravans and serve the commissioners. As soon as he and Mercy sat in his quarters he said, “I need assurances, Mercy. Will there be at least a thousand new men?”
“Unquestionably!” Mercy replied.
“And there will be twenty-seven wagonloads of gifts? We have practically none left, and Indians will not accept any agreement unless it’s solemnized with gifts.”
“I saw the wagons at Kansas City. Knives, guns, food, everything.” He broke into laughter. “And an amazing special gift for the chiefs. Every time I think Washington is filled with imbeciles, someone there comes up with an idea that dazzles me.”
“What is it?” Ketchum asked suspiciously.
“You’ll be astounded,” Mercy said. He then turned to more serious matters. “We’ve sent word to all the tribes. Canada to Texas. We want to build one treaty that will encompass everything.”
“Will they all send representatives?” Ketchum asked.
“That’s what I’m to find out. Where are the Arapaho and Cheyenne camping?”
Captain Ketchum sent for Strunk and asked, “Where are the tribes right now?”
“Last we heard, Oglala Sioux west of the fork. Shoshone far to the west of Laramie Peak. Cheyenne down at Horse Creek, the Arapaho at Scott’s Bluffs …” He was prepared to list six or seven more locations, but Mercy had heard enough.
“Could Strunk and I ride down to the Cheyenne … right now?”
“Of course,” Ketchum agreed, and a party of nine was organized.
“You can show Lisette where to put our things,” Mercy said as he transferred his saddle to a fresh horse.
“Where’d you get the limp?” Ketchum asked professionally.
“Chapultepec,” Mercy said without emotion. “With General Scott.”
“Was it bad … down there?”
“Oh, you’d go for days with no action—never see a Mexican—then they’d dig in at some spot of their own choosing, and it would be lively hell.”
“They fight well?”
“Everyone seems to fight well on his own terrain.”
“Doctors can’t do anything for the leg?”
“The hip. No, I’ll be a major the rest of my life. Crippled … and damned fortunate to be alive.” With this he leaped into his saddle as easily as if his hip were sound, and set out for Horse Creek.
The party rode east along the Platte for thirty miles to where Horse Creek began to join the larger stream, and some miles to the south they found the tall, neat tipis of the Cheyenne, arranged, as always, in circles. It was a beautiful, orderly community, with the side flaps of the tipis raised to facilitate the circulation of summer air, and it bespoke the solidity of this tribe.
“Where’s Broken Thumb?” Strunk asked in Cheyenne.
“That tipi,” a boy replied, and the men rode there.
Only Strunk and Mercy dismounted; the seven soldiers remained on guard, their rifles at the ready across their saddles.
When Major Mercy stooped to enter the tipi he could not immediately adjust his eyes to the darkness, but after a few moments he saw confronting him five Indians informally dressed, and out of the shadows loomed the faces of the men who would determine Indian activity in this region for the next fourteen years.
In the middle sat a man Mercy already knew—a man with a dark scar down his right cheek and the tip of his left little finger missing. It was his own brother-in-law, Jake Pasquinel, now forty-two years old and tense with the disappointment which comes at that age when a man realizes he has made too many wrong choices. Instead of staying with the Arapaho, among whom he might have achieved real leadership, he had drifted from tribe to tribe, learning many languages badly, fit only to serve as interpreter to men who were far less capable than he. Like all half-breeds he stood with one foot in the Indian world, one in the white man’s, and at ease in neither. He was trusted by no one, and suspicion was so constant that he had grown to doubt himself.
To his left, and in the seat of prominence, sat Chief Broken Thumb, twisting the ends of his braids with thumb and finger as if preparing to confront the white man with his string of grievances. Even sitting, he was a tall, impressive man, thirty-five years old and a proved warrior of many coups. Mercy, seeing him for the first time, said to himself, He’s like one of those volcanoes in Mexico. You see the ice in the eyes and can be sure the fire smolders below.
The man on Pasquinel’s right looked quite different—shorter, much less aggressive and apparently more introspective. He had a most handsome face, lean and hawklike, with prominent nose, exaggerated cheekbones and deep lines cutting vertically down both cheeks. His eyes were deeply recessed and very dark, and his whole appearance was given a somewhat grotesque touch by the fact that he wore a white man’s type of hat with moderate brim and very tall crown. It made him look unbalanced, as if both it and the head that wore it were too large for the body that supported them. He did not wear his hair in braids, like the others, but cut straggling-short about his shoulders. The conversation would be far advanced before this reticent chief, then in his forties, would speak, and when he did, it would not be in Cheyenne.
Now Broken Thumb prepared a calumet, keeping it on his knees while he mixed tobacco and kinnikinnick in prescribed amounts. When the pipe was filled and lit, he held it extended at arm’s length to the four compass points, then placed his right hand, palm up, at the extreme end of the bowl, drawing his fingers slowly back along the three feet of stem till they reached his throat. There, with a motion parallel to the earth, he brought his hand across his throat, signifying that what he was about to say was sacred and true. This was the oath of the Indian, the solemn promise of the pipe.
As the calumet passed to the other chiefs, Broken Thumb indicated that Mercy was free to speak, and the captain asked, “Have the messengers come from the Great White Father?”
“They came,” Broken Thumb replied cautiously, pinching his braids.
“And they told you that we can now have peace … forever?”
“They told us.”
“And will you send chiefs to our meeting?”
This was the difficult question, the one on which so much depended, and the three other chiefs sat silent, waiting for Broken Thumb to voice their thinking. Reaching for the calumet, he puffed slowly, then held it in his lap, cradled in both hands. Slowly, but with increasing fervor, he gave the Indian’s answer to the white man’s overture. It was a long speech and was interpreted by Strunk into English, and then by Pasquinel into an Indian language for the benefit of the silent chief to his right.
The White Father wants peace, so that he can send his traders safely through our lands. Of course he wants peace, so that thousands of wagons can cut trails. He wants peace so that his people can kill the buffalo and trap the beaver. But does he want peace strongly enough to deal with us honestly on the matters that divide us?
Here Major Mercy interrupted, intending to ask what the complaints were, but Broken Thumb silenced him imperiously, and spoke with heightened intensity, outlining their grievances. “Long time ago the white men who came across our land were good people. They wanted to build homes. They had their children with them. There was some fighting, but never much, and there was respect. But in the last two years, a different kind of men. Ketchum says ninety thousand came, and all they wanted was gold. Mean, hungry men with no women, no children. They shoot our people for no reason, the way they shoot antelope. They burn our villages for no reason, the way you burn the nests of hornets. They are ugly men, who have only war in their hearts, and we shall give them war.”
He referred this matter to the other chiefs and two of them supported him enthusiastically, with cries of “War! War!” Mercy noticed that the chief in the hat remained quietly brooding in the shadows.
“When the Great White Father determined on war with Mexico,” Broken Thumb continued, “he sent his soldiers across our land, and when they found no Mexicans along the southern river, they wanted to fight us and they killed many of our people. It was not we who started war, Mercy, it was you. We know that you were with the soldiers, because our braves saw you, and now you come here to talk with us of peace. We talk of war!”
Again the two Cheyenne chiefs echoed the defiance, and Mercy sat silent, staring at the floor in humbleness of spirit, because what Broken Thumb said was true. He had marched with his men from Independence along the Arkansas River and down into Texas and Mexico, and in their boredom the men had started shooting down Indians as if they had been turkeys, and villages were burned and squaws violated, and only the iron resistance of men like Mercy had prevented the affair from becoming a total massacre. He suspected that if the Indians knew he had been along, they also knew that it was he who was primarily responsible for halting the disgrace.
“And you must stop selling whiskey to our people,” Broken Thumb continued. “Mercy, what you are doing is contemptible.” In this sentence Broken Thumb used an Indian word Strunk did not know, and there was much discussion as to its translation. It was Mercy who suggested contemptible and when this was translated as without honor, the chiefs agreed. “Because at Fort Laramie the other day I stole a bottle of the real whiskey you drink among yourselves, and it was good to taste. These chiefs have tasted it,” and to Mercy’s astonishment he produced a half-filled bottle of whiskey imported from Scotland, which he asked Mercy and Strunk to taste, and it was the best. “But for us you sell this!” And he produced another bottle, filled with Taos Lightning, and he asked the white men to taste it, and when they refused, well aware of what it was, he thundered in English, “You drink! Goddamn, you drink!” Mercy took a small taste, and it would have been revolting even had he not known its components.
“Contemptible,” Broken Thumb said with deep bitterness. “For a small drink of this,” he said with scorn, “you charge two buffalo robes. With this you take away our squaws and make our children poor. Mercy, are you proud that when your soldiers with their rifles cannot defeat us in battle, you bring this among us to destroy us?”
He put away the bottles, being careful to cork the Scotch, and came to his final point. “Mercy, you must do something about the sickness, the one you call cholera. It has been so terrible among us. At the Mandan villages they were twelve hundred last year, and this year they are less than forty. White Antelope here has lost six members of his family. Tall Mountain has lost four. My wife and two children are dead. You have brought a terrible illness among us, Mercy, and we must have help.”
“It has killed us too,” Mercy said quietly, and he asked Strunk to inform the chiefs of the tragedies of recent years, of whole families of emigrants wiped out in an afternoon—a man would be driving his oxen, would feel nausea and would cry, “The fever!” and even his wife would shun him, and within four hours he would die, with the knowledge that four hours later his wife and children would be dead too. When Strunk finished his narration, Mercy said, “I have ridden this summer from the Missouri River to Fort Laramie and never was I out of sight of some grave. It has been as hard on us as on you.”
“Where did you bring it from, Mercy, you white people?”
“From out there,” he said, pointing to the west, “from across the great water.”
“Will it go on and on and on?”
“It will end,” he assured them. It had to end. It could not continue like this forever, or the world would be wiped away. A man required assurance that when he rose in the morning he would retire at night, barring some fearful accident against which there could be no reasonable defense. But to rise with the daily expectation that fever would strike, and that a few hours later he would be dead, was too much. “It will end,” he repeated, “for you and for us.”
“Will you send medicine?”
“At the forts there will be doctors.”
“Forts?” Jake Pasquinel interrupted.
“Yes, when we have the treaty, the Great Father will need five or six forts … here and there … you know …”
“I do know,” Broken Thumb said coldly. “You will have many forts, and they will require many soldiers, and the soldiers will need many women, and there will be many bottles of whiskey, and while we are drunk in our tipis you will kill the buffalo.” Here he passed into a kind of trance, and he spoke as if he were seeing a tormenting vision of the future: “And when the buffalo are gone, we shall starve, and when we are starving, you will take away our lands, the tipis will be in flames and the rifles will fire and we will be no more. The great lands we have wandered over we will see no more.”
“No more,” White Antelope repeated, and the words seemed to inflame Broken Thumb, and he became a man of iron.
“No!” he shouted. “We want no powwow … no peace … no surrender. It will be war, Mercy. I have prayed to the sacred medicine arrows and I know this to be true. I shall kill you and you shall kill me.”
He passed from reason into a frenzy, throwing himself about the tipi and waving his mangled hand in Mercy’s face, and with a wild gesture he grabbed the calumet and shattered it against a tipi pole. “It is war!” he shouted, his broad face dark and distorted, his braids shaking like snakes.
It was now that the chief in the hat began to speak. From the shadows he reached out a hand and pulled Broken Thumb down beside him, quietening him and saying in Arapaho, “No, it will not be war. If the Great Father wants to talk with us one more time, and if he sends a messenger like Mercy to assure us that this time the talk is serious, then we will meet with him. We will come to Fort Laramie and we will listen and try to fathom what he has in his heart. Like my friend Broken Thumb, I know that the treaty will be made and then broken. I have no hope that the white man can ever say something and mean it, because we never deal with the same white man. One makes the treaty, and he goes. Another comes, but he never heard of the treaty. With us it is different. When the calumet passes, every Arapaho now and to be born is bound.”
When this was interpreted, the chiefs assented, and the speaker continued: “Still we must try. So to you, Broken Thumb, I say, ‘The Cheyenne will go to Fort Laramie,’ and to you, Mercy, I say, ‘Tell the Great Father that Our People are willing to talk with him one more time, because we truly desire peace.’ ”
The speaker was Lost Eagle, chief of Our People, who were camped this summer farther to the east. He had come to discuss with the Cheyenne the message from St. Louis, and for two days he had been arguing, with Pasquinel as his interpreter, that the only hope for the Indian was a lasting treaty with the white man, one that would give the white man freedom to traverse Indian lands and the right to establish forts, and give the Indian a confirmation of his ownership of the land. He was a persuasive arguer, a man who had a view of the future quite different from Broken Thumb’s.
His words commanded attention, for he was known as a man dedicated to bringing his people safely through the troubled years that loomed ahead. He was the grandson of Lame Beaver, whose many coups filled the chronicles of Our People.
He now turned to Broken Thumb and said, “Friend, we stand—you and I—at the edge of a precipice like the ones our fathers used to stampede the buffalo over. But we must not allow ourselves to be stampeded. The white man’s bad medicine has struck us hard. The buffalo are no longer easy to locate. Strangers build forts and farms on our land, and we face many decisions. You are the bravest man I know, Broken Thumb, and often have I followed you to war against Comanche and Pawnee.”
Here he bowed gravely to the Cheyenne warrior, his tall-crowned hat dipping down to hide his face. “But with our few guns we cannot fight the white man with his cannon. If he loses a hundred men, he sends back east for replacements, but if you Cheyenne lose a hundred, where will you find their replacements? You have seen the thousands who have crossed our prairie, and more come at us every year.”
He paused to allow this reasoning to sink in, then asked for a new calumet, and with it took a special oath that what he was about to say was true: “If the white man wants to cross our land, he will do so, whether we give him permission or not. If his sons want some of our land to farm, they will take it, either with our permission or with a gun. I say, let us go with Mercy, who is our friend, and listen to what he has to say.”
As he spoke these conciliatory words, Mercy noticed that his interpreter, Jake Pasquinel, was becoming more and more impatient with the tenor of the message, and it appeared to Mercy that Jake was about to explode, but before anything could happen, White Antelope of the Cheyenne said solemnly, “Lost Eagle, you have never given us bad counsel. How soon will the meeting be?”
Before Mercy could respond, Pasquinel leaped from his seat, flung his arms in the air and shouted in Cheyenne, “Don’t listen to this old woman!” Rushing up to Broken Thumb, he grabbed him by the right arm and pleaded, “Lost Eagle is a fool. The real Arapaho want war … like the real Cheyenne.”
“What’s he saying?” Mercy asked Strunk, and the mountain man replied, “He wants the Cheyenne to ignore Lost Eagle. Wants them to go to war.”
“Jake!” Mercy cried. “You’re talking nonsense!”
The half-breed turned in a flash to confront Mercy, and cried in Cheyenne, “He comes begging you to attend his meeting. Don’t go. The Oglala aren’t going. Neither are the Pawnee.”
“Why are you trying to stop them?” Mercy asked angrily.
“Because you white men will use the meeting to steal from us … more land … more rights.”
“No, Jake. I promise you, this is to be an honest meeting. You and I will be equal. We will listen …”
Pasquinel thrust his face close to Mercy’s and said, “Equal? You will always have the cannon.”
“Jake,” Mercy said softly. “Quiet down. You know the meeting will take place. Lost Eagle has said so.”
“Him!” Jake exploded. “He speaks for no one.”
Now Lost Eagle rose to stand beside Mercy and face the three Cheyenne chiefs. In the next decades his grave, impassive face, topped by the tall-crowned hat, would be painted by four white artists and photographed by many daguerreotypists, so that the deep lines down his cheeks would become familiar across the country, and he would represent the archetypal Indian chief, the man of unshakable integrity.
Asking Strunk to interpret, he said, “We will come to Fort Laramie, and the Cheyenne will come too, and so will Jake … to help us. And when the paper is ready, Broken Thumb and I will sign it side by side.” Then he added with visible sadness, “And we shall do this thing because there is nothing else we can do.”
“Do you trust the white man?” Jake yelled at him.
“No, but we have no other choice. We must trust and hope that this time …” His voice trailed off. Then he took Mercy by the hand and said, “Tell the Great Father that we will be there.”
And as Mercy left the tipi the three crucial figures created such a vivid image that it would persist in his mind forever: Broken Thumb, conservator of the old traditions, in his role as leader, twisting his right braid with the damaged thumb of his right hand; Lost Eagle, the man who had a clear vision of what the future was to be like, standing silent, the lines of his face darkened by shadow; Jake Pasquinel, on whom fell the burden of comprehending both worlds, moving in violent agitation from chief to chief, trying to convince them of the danger to which they had committed themselves.
Mercy and Strunk rode back to the fort in confusion. They had been asked to believe that one man, Lost Eagle, could prevail against four. They were to report that the two key tribes, the Cheyenne and Arapaho, would attend in spite of the fact that Pasquinel had reported a rumor that the Pawnee were not coming.
“What do you think?” Strunk asked.
“If Lost Eagle is the grandson of Lame Beaver, as he says he is, the Arapaho will attend,” Mercy said.
When they reached the fort they found bad news awaiting them. Messengers from the Comanche, the great tribe of the south, had ridden in to say contemptuously, “White man never keeps promises. Why should we waste our horses on so dangerous a trip? And why bring our good horses among those great thieves, the Shoshone and Crow? We will not come.” And that afternoon messengers from the Pawnee reported to Captain Ketchum, “We already have peace with white man. We will not bring our horses among the Sioux.”
With the commissioners from St. Louis on their way, plus the twenty-seven wagons of gifts coming up from Kansas City, Ketchum was discouraged. On the one hand he did not relish the idea of having five or six hundred warlike Indians pressing in upon his half-fort, but on the other, he could not afford to have the proposed meeting collapse before it started, for he commanded the area, and such failure could only mean a black mark on his record. He therefore summoned Major Mercy, Joe Strunk and his lieutenants to a conference in the new officers’ quarters, and was mildly surprised when Mrs. Mercy attended, too.
Lisette Bockweiss Mercy was thirty-six, a woman of great charm, much like her mother, now dead. A tall, exuberant person, she found it easy to accommodate herself to frontier inconveniences; while her husband had been negotiating with Broken Thumb, she had been captivating Fort Laramie. Already her steadfast friend was Mr. Tutt at the sutler’s store, who confided the standard complaint about the post: “You freeze all winter, sweat all summer, and are bored all year. If I have to stay here two more years, I believe I’ll go crazy.”
“Nonsense,” she told him. “My father pitched his camp right where you’re standing, and spent a whole year with just one other man.”
“Your father!” Mr. Tutt repeated incredulously. “I thought you grew up in Boston.”
“You give me a gun and a horse,” she teased, “and I’ll bring you in a buffalo.”
Now, at the conference, she gave sound advice: “Why not send down to Zendt’s Farm to get that marvelous old Indian expert, Alexander McKeag, and send him among the tribes? He speaks all the languages and he could persuade them.”
“McKeag must be in his seventies,” Strunk protested, his pride wounded by the suggestion that some other mountain man might do the job better than he.
“Seventy or not,” Lisette said, “he’d be most useful.”
So it was agreed that Major Mercy would ride down to the South Platte and speak with McKeag and such tribes as they could conveniently reach on the way back. “I’m especially eager to get the Shoshone here,” Ketchum said. “They’ve been fighting everybody.”
But before Mercy could depart, the first good news broke. “Here come the Oglala chiefs,” shouted the lookout, and everyone watched with apprehension as they forded first the Platte, then the Laramie. In grave silence they came to the adobe fort, bowed ceremoniously from their caparisoned horses and said, “The Oglala will come.”
“Thank you!” Captain Ketchum said. He invited them to dismount and led them to his quarters in the new building. “There will be many presents,” he promised them. “You will go home with peace—peace for all the tribes.”
This phrase disturbed the Oglala. “We will not come if the Shoshone come,” they said solemnly.
“Oh, but the Shoshone must come,” Ketchum said briskly. “Translate that for them and explain why.”
Strunk did his best, stressing the indestructible brotherhood that existed among the tribes. At the end he was sweating, and the Oglala said, “If the Shoshone come, we will kill them all.”
“Oh, hell!” Ketchum groaned. “Mercy, get out of here and pick up what’s-his-name. McCabe? Ask him if he thinks the Shoshone and the Sioux can meet together.”
So Maxwell Mercy, attended by four good riflemen, rode south to Zendt’s Farm, where he found only sorrow. Three weeks before, cholera had carried off both Alexander McKeag and his Indian wife, Clay Basket.
“In the morning McKeag was as well as I am,” Levi Zendt said with obvious grief. “A chill. Nausea. Horrible death. Next morning Clay Basket began shaking. We buried them both down by the river.”
Mercy was deeply saddened by such sudden death, even though a few days before he had rationalized it to the chiefs. He walked down to the river and knelt by the circle of stones marking the graves. He said a short prayer for the quiet Scotsman who had contributed so much to the west. Without rising, he turned toward the mound that covered the Indian woman who had married Lisette’s father; he remembered her as she was when she helped run the post at Fort John, soft-spoken and capable. She had been the dutiful wife of two quite different men and had been loved by each. How many squaws, he thought as he prayed, had served in this silent manner, bearing half-breed sons like the Pasquinel brothers and lovely, dark-skinned daughters like Lucinda.
“I hope the treaty we devise will prove good to women like you, Clay Basket,” he said aloud, and on her grave he placed a clump of sage, the only flower growing in midsummer, and scarcely a flower at all.
Lucinda, now twenty-four and at the height of her beauty, volunteered the idea that Levi should go north to act as interpreter, and she showed no fear about running the farm alone. “I’ve got the children to keep me busy, and we have three Pawnee who’ll stay as long as I feed them.”
As the two men, brothers-in-law of a sort, rode west they talked, and Zendt said, “My wife’s half-Indian, and I try to understand what’s happenin’, but sometimes I’m plain confused. All day I hear white men complain about the shiftless, no-good Indian. Won’t work for a livin’. Isn’t fit to own land. And then I look at the land after the white men pass through. What they don’t want they just junk beside the trail. Their dead animals decay till the stench fills the prairies. And I say that in some things that count, the Indian is a damn sight better than the white.”
Mercy was inclined to agree, and was prepared to say so when Zendt added, “I can’t figure you out, Mercy. You could have a fancy life back east, but here you are, workin’ for this treaty like you were an Indian.”
Mercy rode in silence for some time, looking at the prairies as they swept to the northern horizon, then to the mountains emerging in the west, and finally he said, “Simple. I love this land. Loved it the first time I saw it, with you and Elly.” The name recalled painful memories and he said, “She was the soul of the west.”
Levi said nothing, and after a while Mercy snapped his fingers and said briskly, “What you say about the settlers is true, Levi. A grubby lot. But it’s them, not the goldminers, who’ll build this land. And when they do, they won’t want Indian war parties raiding through their fields or buffalo tearing down their fences. They’re going to come … can’t stop them. The enemy of the tipi is not the rifle. It’s the plow.”
“Can the same land hold a farmer and an Indian?”
“My hope is that with this treaty we’ll be able to arrange a truce. Land along the Platte for the white farmer. Empty lands like this for the Indian and his buffalo.”
“You think land like this can ever be farmed?” Zendt asked.
“Never. This is desert. And I think that if we can arrange a treaty now, rather than wage a war against the Indians five years from now, it’ll cost our government a lot less money in the long run.”
“You’re not interested in the money,” Zendt countered.
“I’m interested in justice,” Mercy said. “You and I have each been close to death, and that clears the air of petty ideas like money and advancement.”
Zendt accepted this as the statement of a reasonable man, and they rode westward into Shoshone country, where they consulted with Chief Washakie, who said that he would not take his braves into the heart of Sioux country, for the enmity between the two tribes had been marked by constant skirmishes and many deaths.
“It is this that we want to end,” Levi explained in broken Ute, a language close to that used by the Shoshone, and he explained with Mercy’s help how Fort Laramie would be neutral territory, a safe place for all the tribes to congregate.
“The Sioux will kill us if we venture onto their land,” Washakie repeated.
“It is nobody’s land,” Levi insisted. “The Cheyenne will be there …”
“They’re worse than the others,” Washakie protested.
But Mercy moved in with compelling reasons. “There will be much food at the treaty,” he said. “There will be many presents from the Great Father in Washington. Do you want to deprive your people of this bounty?” When Zendt translated this, Washakie’s face broke into a smile and he said, “If there are to be presents, we will have to come,” and on the spur of the moment Mercy thought to ask, “We? How many?”
“All of us,” Washakie said. “If it’s a decision affecting all our tribe … all of us.”
“How many?” Mercy asked weakly.
“We are fourteen hundred,” Washakie said, and by the time Mercy and Zendt left the area, the Shoshone were starting to collect food and some were folding their tipis.
When Mercy got back to Fort Laramie he found it in turmoil. One of the commissioners had reached the fort early with disastrous news. “Tell him,” Captain Ketchum directed, and the official from Washington took the major aside and recited a doleful story, whose potential for tragedy he did not even yet appreciate: “The government allocated fifty thousand dollars for this treaty. Just for the Indians. But instead of commissioning the goods in St. Louis, as we’ve done for all previous treaties, some clerk decided to buy them this time in New York. Cheaper. And in New York some other clerk decided that while we said the goods had to be in St. Louis on July 1, he felt that July 18 would be just as good, and then he found he could save a little more by using a slower railroad, so maybe they won’t get here till September.”
“I left St. Louis early,” the commissioner explained. “Had some work to do with the Sac and Fox, and when I finally got to Kansas City the presents had arrived, and I thought, ‘They’ll make it in time,’ but I was there for six days and the wagons hadn’t moved a foot.”
“What did you do?”
“Raised hell. Got them started.”
“When will they be here?”
“They’re promised for September 15. Probably get here by October 15.”
“You’ll dispatch a messenger to Kansas City. Tonight.”
“We’ve done so,” the commissioner said lamely. “Believe me, it was the contractors who are at fault in this dreadful thing. We commissioners know better.”
Mercy went to the window and pointed to the meadows beyond the parade grounds, where Indian tipis were already beginning to appear. “Commissioner,” he said quietly, “they’re beginning to gather. God alone knows how many will be there, but if they don’t have food—Look! We have only a hundred and sixty soldiers in this garrison, with a thousand more on their way …”
The commissioner coughed. “Major, I’m to advise you on that, too. The War Department has changed its mind. It needs the promised men elsewhere.” He paused and said, “Your thousand men are not coming.”
“How many are?”
“Thirty-three dragoons. Escort for the main negotiators.”
Major Mercy left the window and sat down. “You mean we have thousands of Indians congregating here—most of them braves, eager for a fight—and we have to do with a hundred and sixty men plus a handful of dragoons?”
“That’s right.”
“Oh, Jesus!” He stormed from his quarters and ran across the parade ground to the old adobe fort, where Captain Ketchum was meeting with his staff and the mountain men.
Before Mercy could explode, Ketchum asked soberly, “How many Shoshone are coming?”
“One thousand four hundred.”
Ketchum added some figures and reported, “That makes over seven thousand for sure, as of this moment, and we haven’t heard from the Crow, the Assiniboin or the Hidatsa.”
“You mean ten thousand Indians are coming to this fort?” Mercy asked.
“At least. More like eleven thousand … twelve thousand.”
“And we have a hundred and sixty effectives?”
“Plus the commissioners … the mountain men … and the dragoons!”
“Tell me,” said the commissioner, who had followed Mercy across the grounds, “how did this miscalculation occur?”
“You tell him, Zendt,” Ketchum directed, and Levi asked an Oglala chief to join them. The chief said in broken English, “White man always say ‘Chief, do this’ or ‘Chief, make your tribe do that.’ Same like Great White Father. But Indian chief nobody. He my uncle, my cousin. Nobody tell him, ‘Chief, you big man now. You run tribe.’ He run tribe just so long he do what we want. My uncle, he chief and he have some good ideas, some bad. He talk, we listen, we do. He good man, but he nobody.”
“Don’t you choose a chief?” the commissioner asked. “Well, for life?”
The young Oglala laughed. “Chief he lose teeth, he can’t bite buffalo, he finish.”
“What does this have to do with ten thousand Indians?” the commissioner asked.
Zendt replied, “Just this. You can’t go to the Oglala and tell them, ‘Send us your chiefs,’ because if the chiefs are going to talk about something that affects the whole tribe, the whole tribe will come along. A chief is not a senator. Like the brave says, he’s only as good as his teeth. Or as long as he gives sound advice.”
“What will we do?” the commissioner asked Captain Ketchum.
“I don’t know what we’ll do,” Ketchum said. “A handful of men against ten thousand Indians … no food … no gifts. But I can tell you what I’m going to do.”
“What?”
“Pray.” And as he looked out from the fort he saw the tribes from the north drifting in, and no chief rode alone. He was accompanied by his entire tribe, including the children, the dogs and especially the horses—thousands of them.
In all previous American history there had been nothing like the gathering at Fort Laramie that summer, and in the decades to follow there could be nothing to equal it, for in those later years the Indians would be dispersed, and they would lack ponies and tipis and eagle feathers for their war bonnets. But in late August of 1851 they stood at the apex of their power, and as they assembled from all points they were majestic.
First the mighty Sioux came from the northeast, the many tribes glistening in paint and feathers. They had small horses and rode them moderately well; their grandeur lay in the terrible intensity with which they pursued an objective, whether peaceful or warlike. They were the powerful Indians, willing to engage eight different enemy tribes at once, and when they came into camp they brought with them an ancient insolence. Each tribe had its special characteristics—Brulé, Oglala, Minniconjou, Hunkpapa—but all were members of the same warlike society. In their center rode their principal chiefs, who bore aloft an American flag awarded them at some earlier treaty.
From the northwest came the Assiniboin, slim men unbelievably attuned to their horses. They rode like centaurs, man and horse united in one flesh, moving together in subtle grace. To see them coming across an open prairie was to see motion and dust and waving grass frozen together for a moment, then dissolving as the procession came closer. These Indians wore no headdresses; their dignity resided in their solemn character, bred in remote canyons far from the white man.
Up the Platte came the Cheyenne, tallest of the tribes and incomparably the noblest in appearance. They rode their horses well, sat like graven images, with their right hands on their hips, and impressed the assembly with the beauty of their headdresses and the fineness of their garments. They were the nobility of the plains, the men of arrogance and self-assurance. For two hundred years they had defended themselves against any combination, and now they rode as if they possessed the prairies. In war they fought with unparalleled courage, and no other tribe in the Platte region had done more to protect the plains from desecration. Their six leading chiefs—Broken Thumb, Bear’s Feather, White Antelope, Little Chief, Rides-on-Clouds and Lean Bear—created a powerful impression of dignity as they rode into camp, for they were tall, slim, handsomely groomed, and their war bonnets were made of finest eagle feathers set in a stout gold-colored webbing decorated with quills. Each chief, because of his raiment, seemed mightier than he was; they formed a compelling phalanx as the sun struck them from the left, their bronzed faces moving in and out of shadow. Behind them, in strict military array, rode the younger chiefs, some almost naked, some in garb only slightly less imposing than their elders’. In the rear, guarding the folded tipis and the children, came the women, tall and dignified, prepared to support their chieftains in whatever decisions were reached.
From the north came the strangers, the Mandan, the Hidatsa and the Arikara, who had come only because of the assurances given by Father De Smet. They were ill-at-ease, so far south, but they came seeking protection from emigrants who were beginning to traverse their lands. They were shorter than the plains Indians but in some ways more knowing, for they had been in contact with the white man since the days of Lewis and Clark.
From the west came the strangest contingent, a small group of one hundred and eighty-three dark-skinned Shoshone, moving cautiously, each with a loaded rifle across his arms. Their arrival created a storm of excitement, and Joe Strunk shouted to the soldiers, “Watch out for trouble!”
What had happened was this. When the Shoshone left camp in western Wyoming, all fourteen hundred set forth. Their interpreter was Jim Bridger, bravest of the mountain men and one of the most canny; their chief was Washakie, who would play a notable role in subsequent history, and under the leadership of these two men they felt so secure that they traveled for some time in company with a wagon train led by white men, but as they moved eastward, a Cheyenne war party struck from the north, killing a Shoshone chief and his son.
Bridger was appalled at this breaking of an understood truce, and Chief Washakie announced that if there was to be a renewal of ancient Cheyenne-Shoshone warfare, his tribe would refuse to move any farther east. A compromise was struck whereby the women and children were sent back to camp while Washakie led the warriors of his tribe to the meeting, provided military escort were assured from Fort Laramie.
Captain Ketchum, striving desperately to maintain peace, sent Strunk and Mercy to the Cheyenne, exacting from them a solemn promise that they would not further molest the Shoshone, and White Antelope and Broken Thumb gave the assurance, and enforced it. “No war from us,” Broken Thumb promised several times, and in proof of his good will he told Strunk, “When Shoshone reach camp, we will give them a feast … and make them presents they will treasure.” Mercy shook hands with the Cheyenne chiefs and reported to Ketchum, “With the Cheyenne there will be no trouble. Broken Thumb has said so, and he keeps his word.”
“Go back and assure the Shoshone,” Ketchum directed, so Mercy rode out with Strunk, and in a mountain pass to the west they found the warriors, tense and suspicious. “This is to be a convention of true peace,” Mercy assured Bridger, and when this was translated for Washakie, that great chief said grudgingly, “We will try.” So the Shoshone, led by Washakie on a white horse, with Mercy, Strunk and Bridger at his side, rode cautiously toward the vast encampment, their horses eager to leap forward into battle if necessary, their weapons ready for the command to charge. But when they saw the multitude, and the manner in which Sioux camped by Assiniboin, they relaxed, and in the end they pitched their tipis next to those of their mortal enemy, the Cheyenne.
And from the southwest, when the others had gathered, came the poets of the prairies, the tall, quiet, hesitant Arapaho, less arrogant than the Cheyenne, less imposing than the Sioux. They were handsome men, grave of countenance and stately of mien; they were the philosophers, the artists, the ones who listened when the others spoke, but they were men and women of terrible determination, and if necessary, were willing to hazard their future and the future of their children’s children. They were not a tribe to be trifled with, these Arapaho, for they were men and women gifted with an inner dignity that had never so far been subdued. Their chiefs—Eagle Head, Lost Eagle, White Crow, Cut Nose, Little Owl—were sedate men who had come to reason with the White Father, to advise him of their problems and to seek accommodation.
When the tribes were assembled and the days of adjustment completed, the discussions were about to begin when a scout shouted from the northwest sector, “Here they come! My God, look at ’em.” Riding from the west, with the morning sun striking their faces, came an enormous contingent of three thousand Crow, whom many considered the ideal braves. They were not so dark as some of the other tribes; they were a moody people, vacillating between gravity and exhilaration, and were reported by traders who had dealt with them to be of unusual intelligence. They were a mighty nation, prowling the northern Rockies and holding tenaciously to valleys which had long been theirs.
“They know horses!” the professional soldiers cried admiringly, for although the Crow had ridden eight hundred miles, they now spurred their horses to a canter and they came across the prairie like waves coming to shore. In the forefront rode four chiefs, resplendent in costumes not known among the watching tribes: nine strings of cowries about their necks, long strands of elk bones falling from their temples, breastplates from which dangled scores of ermine tails, and most conspicuous, their hair standing upright in huge pompadours, kept in place by gum from spruce trees.
The four chiefs rode silently, looking straight ahead, but behind them came other braves looking warily from side to side, for they were entering alien land where they might be attacked at any moment. In the center of the horde rode the women, beautifully garbed, while along the flanks, on small black-and-white ponies, rode the boys nine and ten years old, fully prepared to engage the enemy.
At a signal from one of the chiefs, a band of cavalry broke from the rear and thundered to the fore, two hundred men nearly naked, riding their horses savagely. Then, to the surprise of the watchers, each man, keeping one leg wrapped about the saddletree, leaned far down on the right flank of his galloping horse, leaned under the neck and fired a salute from an old flintlock rifle.
Before the crowd could respond, the three thousand Crow reined in their horses, slowed them to a walk, and with the sun exploding on their tired and dusty faces, broke into the song of their nation—a moving chant which told of far mountains—and their voices filled the morning air.
The first decision reached by Ketchum and the commissioners was a sensible one. They convened with Mercy, Zendt, Strunk and Bridger, and asked, “How many Indians have we on our hands?”
“I’d say about fourteen thousand,” Mercy replied.
“And how many horses?”
“Maybe thirty thousand,” Zendt estimated.
“Impossible,” Ketchum growled.
“Couldn’t be less than twenty-seven thousand,” Bridger said.
“We can’t feed that many horses,” Ketchum wailed. “What can we do?”
Mercy told the commissioners, “When I visited the Cheyenne a month ago I found them camped south of Horse Creek. About thirty-five miles down the Platte. Big meadows, good grass.”
The commissioners asked Bridger what he thought of the place, but he had not come that way. Strunk said, “Enough grass down there to feed sixty thousand.” Ketchum looked skeptical.
So the decision was announced that all Indians plus a negotiating team would head southeast along the Platte to more adequate pasturage, and the vast assemblage prepared to make the move, which all approved. One hundred and seventy soldiers would go along, leaving a handful to guard the fort that night. But before they left, there was an auspicious sign. Chiefs Broken Thumb and White Antelope walked on foot to the camp of the suspicious Shoshone, where the former said, “Brothers, we have been at war too long. Our braves did wrong when they killed your people one moon past, and we offer you our friendship.”
Chief Washakie accepted the gesture and embraced the two visitors, whereupon White Antelope said, “We have come to invite you to a feast—all of you to be our honored guests,” and he led the eighty-three Shoshone across the parade grounds and into the heart of the Cheyenne camp, where a generous feast of deer had been laid out, and word passed through all the camp, Indian and white alike, that the Shoshone and the Cheyenne were feasting in brotherhood, and from each tribe certain chiefs filtered into the Cheyenne camp to see for themselves this miracle, and they arrived in time to see Chief Broken Thumb direct his squaw to rise from her place and walk over to Chief Washakie and present him with the two scalps the Cheyenne had lifted from the dead Shoshone, and as she surrendered them, Broken Thumb said, “We honored these trophies as memories of a good battle. Now we hand them back to you as proof of our lasting friendship.” And through the camp there were sounds of approbation.
Next morning the monumental procession got under way, this single largest assembly of Indians ever, riding into the sunlight, sometimes in single file, at other times six and eight abreast—Crow and Brulé, Arikara and Oglala, side by side in an amity they had never known before. The line of march, broken here and there by small contingents of American soldiers, stretched out for fifteen miles, and as he saw them go, Captain Ketchum whispered to one of the commissioners, “If those Indians got it in their minds, they could wipe us out in ten minutes.”
Fortunately, the Indians had other things in mind, for as the column approached the new campgrounds Major Mercy, riding with the Shoshone, saw bands of Sioux and Cheyenne women rushing ahead to a small plateau overlooking the confluence of the two streams, and there, without consulting the white men present, they swung into confused action, lugging in many poles and unfurling buffalo robes.
“What in hell are they doin’?” Strunk asked, and Mercy looked around till he found Jake Pasquinel.
“Our contribution,” Pasquinel replied, and the men watched in awe as the women constructed a ceremonial bower decorated with flowers, and an amphitheater area in which the formal discussions would be held. It was a creation lovely in appearance, totally Indian in concept and exactly right for the purpose at hand. As with many Indian designs, the amphitheater opened to the east so that evil spirits which might be planning to disturb the debate could escape; the good spirits, of course, would remain behind to guide the deliberations.
Two soldiers, watching the women scrambling up the poles to lash down the last buffalo robes, were astonished that they could work so fast. “Beat any men I saw in Boston,” one said.
The spirit that emanated from the discussions was as felicitous as the building in which they were held. Probably never in the history of the United States would a plenary session of any kind be convened in which such abundant good will would be manifest. The white men honestly wanted to reach a treaty that would be just and permanent. The Indians sought with open hearts to arrange land and rights in such a way that all could live honorably. The discussions of minor points were conducted, and some of the speeches which were recorded would have done justice to Versailles or Westminster.
It was a Crow chief, Brave Arm, who set the pattern for Indian comment: “Great Leader, we have ridden many days to hear your speech. Our ears have not been stopped. They have been open, and we begin to feel good in our hearts at what they hear. We came hungry, but we know that you will feed us. As the sun looks down upon us, as the Great Spirit watches me, I am willing to do as you tell me to do. I know you will tell me right and that what you direct will be good for my people. We regard this as a great medicine day when our pipes of peace are one and we are all at peace.”
Major Mercy, speaking for the United States government, said, “I am directed by the Great White Father in Washington to invite a chief from each of your nations to travel to his home to meet with him. He wants you to ride your horses down to the Missouri River, where a boat will be waiting for you. From there you will go to St. Louis, where you will see our finest city in the west. Then you will board a train and ride across our great country to Washington, where he will talk with you and give you his own solemn promise that this peace is forever, that the lands you get now are yours for as long as the waters flow and the grass shall grow. So as we talk during these last days, each tribe must be thinking, ‘Which of our chiefs do we want to send to Washington to meet the Great Father?’ And on the last day you shall tell us, and we will all start for Washington together.”
It was Lost Eagle who summed up the Indian position, and he did so with the full approval of the Cheyenne and the Sioux and the Crow, for he was known among them as a judicious man: “It is not for us to tell the Great White Father how we judged his words. You men of the army who have met with us, you commissioners who have smoked the pipe with us, you must tell him how you found us. Were we just in the discussions? Did we listen when you explained why you had to have certain trails? Did we suggest places where you could build your forts? Speak of us as you saw us during these days. And when you have done that, speak also of three things that will exist as long as the sun shines. We must have buffalo, for without food our bodies will perish. We must be permitted to ride the open prairie without the white man’s trails cutting us off from old grounds, for without freedom our spirits will perish. And we must have peace. The Crow is willing to sit here with the Sioux. The Cheyenne meet here with the Shoshone. And all assemble with the white man as their brother. We shall have peace.”
While the chiefs were occupied with such discussion, their tribesmen were engaged in lively social activity. Tribal animosities were ignored as one group after another organized feasts and conducted dances. With sophisticated sign languages, tribes swapped stories of bravado and escapades on the plains. The beat of tom-toms sounded through the day and long into the night, with as many as forty or fifty celebrations under way. In normal times such echoes would have sent a spasm of dread down the spines of white listeners, but now they attended the dances and sometimes joined in beating the drums offered them.
The only deterrent to festivity was a lack of food. The wagons were still delayed on their snail-like crawl from Kansas City, and meat became so scarce that the northern Sioux sent bands of young men into the distant Black Hills to hunt, and they returned with some buffalo, but not enough to feed the hungry mob. So the Indians took recourse in the dog feast, from which most of the whites politely excused themselves.
Once a cur had been killed, by being hanged, it was put on a fire and singed. When the skin was scraped clean, the carcass was dressed, cut up and put into a large copper kettle, where it was boiled until the bones were easily removed. Then it was flavored with prairie herbs and dried plums, becoming a succulent dish which the plains tribes considered a delicacy. After observing a sequence of such feasts, Father De Smet noted in his diary: “No epoch of Indian annals shows a greater massacre of the canine race.”
The lack of food distressed Captain Ketchum, who warned the commissioners, “If those damned wagons don’t get here soon, these Indians will begin to starve. And if I am forced to inform fourteen thousand betrayed Indians that there are no gifts, either …” He coughed. “Gentlemen, I would advise that on this night you write very tender letters to your wives.”
He dispatched Joe Strunk eastward to check on the wagons, but two days later the mountain man returned, glum. “No wagons in sight,” he said, and Ketchum instructed the commissioners, “Make your speeches longer.”
Attention was diverted from this lack of food by Broken Thumb, who assembled one hundred of the finest Cheyenne horsemen, telling them, “We shall remind the white man that while we talk of peace, we remain ready for war. And if he has plans to trick us again, let him know what waits.”
Dressed in war regalia, the hundred braves mounted their ponies and came thundering into the open space before the assembly area, where the negotiators were meeting. There they began a series of intricate and wild maneuvers. The men were armed, some with lances, some with guns, the rest with bows and arrows. Upon the hips and shoulders of each horse were painted indications of the coups that rider had won: a scalp was signified by a red hand, while a horse that had been stolen cleanly in a foray against the enemy was marked by a black horse’s hoof.
Under Broken Thumb’s direction, the Cheyenne engaged in a maneuver of which they were particularly proud. Congealing in what seemed a hopeless mass of confused horses and riders, they fired their guns aimlessly and shot arrows into the air until Broken Thumb uttered a loud war cry, whereupon one group of riders from the center pushed out to form a circular ring of protection about the whole. Then, with bloodcurdling screams, the horsemen exchanged places, those on the outside turning inward and those on the inside bursting through, each missing the other by inches, an intricate, endlessly moving design.
A principal delight of the gathering was Lisette Mercy. The Indian women were pleased that a white woman had seen fit to attend, and each day they gathered to inspect her. Lisette was a pretty woman whose light hair and many petticoats enthralled the squaws. On some days as many as a hundred would draw their fingers down her delicately rouged cheeks to see if the color would come off. They pried into her petticoats as if they were badgers inspecting a cave. And if she had permitted, they would have plucked her bald on the first day; unfortunately, some squaws had pulled out a few hairs and all felt that they were entitled to do likewise.
Lisette reacted to the encampment as only the daughter of someone like Lise Bockweiss Pasquinel could have done. Since food was scarce, she rode back to the fort to collect all the candy, tobacco and flour she could, plus as many jars of vermilion as Mr. Tutt had in his sutler’s shop. When she returned she delighted the children by drawing red circles on their cheeks. She sang old French songs and in the evening talked with the chiefs, congratulating them on how well things were going.
Because she was a Pasquinel, the Indians thought of her as their special friend, and she was often called upon to calm her half brother Jake when he agonized over the treaty provisions. When he was with her he dropped the rhetoric of war, but voiced a despair that was even more compelling.
“This hasn’t been a bargaining, Lisette. It’s been a present handed to the white man. He takes what he wants and then gives us back what is already ours. If we voice any doubts, he buys off the old chiefs with baubles and trinkets. In the end, you watch. He’ll have everything and we’ll have nothing.”
He was a tormented man: “You and Mike and I have the same father. With you—yes, and with Max too—I can be at peace, but never with the other whites. When I was a boy they gave me this scar. And don’t be fooled by Mike. He plays the clown and tries to pretend there’s some way out, but when we talk at night he knows our destruction is inevitable.”
During the closing days of the meeting, no one was busier than Father De Smet. Day and night he rushed from one group to another, baptizing babies at a rate not equaled since the days of Galilee: Indians, half-breeds, whites who had been long in the mountains, he baptized them all. He would accept people of any age or any condition, promising each an equal share of God’s beneficence. One night, following a day during which he had been especially active, he wrote a report to his superiors:
During the two weeks that I have passed in the plain of the Great Council, I paid frequent visits to the different tribes and bands of savages, accompanied by one or more of their interpreters. These last were extremely obliging in devoting themselves to my aid in announcing the gospel. The Indians listened eagerly to my instructions. They besought me to explain baptism to them, as several had been present when I had baptized several half-breed children. I complied with their request, and gave them a lengthy instruction on its blessings and obligations. All then entreated me to grant this favor to their infants. Among the Arapaho, I baptized 305 little ones; among the Cheyenne 253; among the Oglala 239; and among the Brulé and Osage Sioux 280; in the camp of Painted Bear 53.
Shortly after he baptized the Arapaho children they fell ill, and the tribe concluded that his religion was false. But among the Sioux he had enormous success, for his description of heaven, where good people go, and hell, where evil ones reside, was much to their liking, for as one chief explained, “It will be fine to be in heaven and not have to bother about white men, who will all be in hell.”
In spite of Jake Pasquinel’s doubts, the terms of the treaty were as just as could have been devised, and for once, all Indian tribes were treated fairly. An effective basis for lasting peace was achieved, one binding not only white and Indian but also each Indian tribe in its conduct with its neighbors. The government gained what it had always wanted: the right to build forts, establish roads and maintain the peace. In return, it bound itself to protect Indians against depredations by whites, while the Indians were obligated to make restitution for any wrongs committed by them.
The government promised to pay the total Indian community an annuity of fifty thousand dollars for fifty years, which the government considered an honorable offer which compensated them for losses so far incurred. A notable feature was a plan whereby the prairie was cut into large segments and allocated to individual tribes, with the understanding that a hunting party from another tribe could follow buffalo wherever they went. Boundaries for the northern tribes were set by Father De Smet, who was acceptable to all, and the southern lines were drawn by Major Mercy and Levi Zendt, who awarded the Cheyenne and Arapaho a generous territory:
Commencing at the Red Butte, or the place where the road leaves the north fork of the Platte River; thence up the north fork of the Platte River to its source; thence along the main range of the Rocky Mountains to the headwaters of the Arkansas River; thence down the Arkansas River to the crossing of the Santa Fe road; thence in a northwesterly direction to the forks of the Platte River, and thence up the Platte River to the place of beginning.
This meant that 6400 Indians now owned in perpetuity some ninety thousand square miles, or more than fifty-seven million acres. Thus each Indian received fourteen square miles, or about thirty-six thousand acres for a family of four. In later years this Cheyenne-Arapaho allocation would support more than two million white men who, because they understood agriculture and manufacturing, would earn from it a good living.
Why was so much potentially valuable land given to the two tribes in 1851? Simply because both groups involved in making the treaty had false understandings of the land they were dealing with. Still prisoners of the mistaken concept promulgated by Major Mercy, whites believed the plains to be a desert which could not be farmed; Indians were convinced they were useful only for the buffalo. As always, when the significance of a natural resource is misunderstood, any land settlement must end in disaster.
Only two men refused to lose their senses in the general euphoria that marked the final days of treaty-making. The first was Chief Broken Thumb, who knew that no white man could possibly honor a treaty that surrendered lands so spacious. “Go home in peace,” he told his young braves sardonically, “but prepare for war. The treaty will soon be broken and soldiers will march out from the forts we have given them.” Seeking Lost Eagle, he called for Jake Pasquinel to translate, and warned, “Go to Washington, little brother, and humble yourself before the Great White Father, but as you go, remember that when the time comes for you to collect the promised money, there will be a different father, and when you petition him for your annuity, he will cry, ‘Who is this fool, Lost Eagle? Never saw him before.’ And there will be no buffalo and no money and no peace, and on that day you will follow me to war. As this campground now gives off a mighty stench from all of us gathered here, so, too, will this treaty.”
The other cynic was Jake Pasquinel, for when Broken Thumb finished speaking, he said on his own, “Lost Eagle, you are a great fool. When we came here Captain Ketchum promised us two things. Food and presents. Do we have either? You foolish man, they have broken your treaty before it even started.”
Lost Eagle did not know how to answer his critics. He, more than any other Cheyenne or Arapaho, had persuaded the two tribes to accept the new order, but even before the smoke had left the calumet, the first promises seemed to be broken. Still he had faith, and he said, “If a man like Major Mercy breaks his word, there is no meaning in the world. We will get our presents.”
And he moved among all the tribesmen, advising them to stay at Fort Laramie a few days longer. “The presents will be here. Major Mercy said so,” and then he went to the major and said, “Broken Thumb and the others are growing desperate. They are hungry,” and Mercy promised him, “The food will come.”
And then, after three days of miserable waiting, a scout came roaring in from the east with tremendous news: “Twenty-seven wagons! Half a day’s journey to the east!”
An escort of two thousand Indians fanned out across the plains, and when they saw the loaded wagons, their hubs dragging dust, a soaring hope rose in the hearts of all men, for this was a good omen.
It required the chiefs three days to unload the wagons and distribute the presents: tobacco, coffee so highly treasured, sugar, warm blankets from Baltimore, Green River knives, beads sewn on cardboard from Paris, dried beef, flour, jars of jam and preserves. Feasts were held at which Father De Smet said prayers and men ate till they were sick.
But the real gifts came on the final day! Then Captain Ketchum summoned the principal chiefs and told them, “The Great White Father in Washington loves his children, and when they have worked wisely with him, he gives them gifts which make them part of his family. To each of you chiefs who have signed the treaty he sends a uniform … a full uniform of his army … you are now all army officers.”
And from the bales Mr. Tutt broke forth a series of resplendent uniforms, complete with shoes, cap, sashes and swords. A captain’s uniform, “Better than mine,” Ketchum pointed out, went to each of the minor chiefs. For the major chiefs there were the starred uniforms of a brigadier general. And for Washakie of the Shoshone, Lost Eagle of the Arapaho and three others, there were the costly uniforms of major general, the epaulettes shimmering in gold.
At Captain Ketchum’s request, the chiefs donned the uniforms, and although some did not exactly fit, the new officers made a fine display, except that before they could line up for a dress review, an Oglala Sioux who had been sent south to scout for meat reported: “Buffalo on the South Platte!” and the newly commissioned officers dashed off toward Rattlesnake Buttes.
Levi Zendt followed them south at his own pace, satisfied that when they had made their kills they would bring the skins to Zendt’s Farm for trading. They did. But the profit that resulted caused no joy, for his attention was diverted by a letter from the east.
Lampeter, Penna.
The Five Zendts
Brother Levi,
I received your letter with the $12 to buy a Fordney gun, yours having been stolen, but there is nothing I can do to help you now, as God has seen fit to visit Lancaster and strike down the blasphemer who lusts after evil ways.
Four times our church directed Melchior Fordney either to marry the woman with which he was living in lust and four times he laughed at the elders. Four times too many for God’s patience.
So John Gaggerty, acting on behalf of God, took a broadax and went for sinner Fordney and chopped him down, severing his head, and then he went after the scarlet woman Mrs. Trippet and chopped her down too, slaying her in the scene of her sin. Thus does God revenge himself on the infidel.
I am shamed to report that the courts in Lancaster saw fit to condemn that good man Haggerty for what he done and they hanged him in Lancaster jail. Many good people are outraged, but the courts in Lancaster often seem to do the work of the devil.
Since Fordney is dead, I am applying your $12 against the value of the two horses you stole from me. Your debt is now $88.
Your loving brother in God,
Mahlon Zendt
When Levi finished reading, he told Lucinda, “Michael Fordney was one of the best men I knew in Lancaster.” And as he compared the gunsmith with his own brothers, he became increasingly irritated. “Damnit,” he stormed. “I have four brothers back there, and you’d think Mahlon would tell me whether they were married or had children or what.”
“You never sent him news about yourself,” Lucinda teased.
“But I’m the one away from home. He didn’t even tell if Momma is still livin’,” and he thought of the farm and the trees and the little buildings in which he had made souse and smoked hams, and he was overcome with homesickness.
Then he laughed at himself and rose and walked around the table to kiss Lucinda. “What I really wanted to know, if I told the truth, is did he marry the Stoltzfus girl? The mean pig, he didn’t even tell me that.”
And suddenly the concerns of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, seemed far away. Here in the west the future of a great part of the nation was being determined, yet his petty-minded brothers knew nothing of it. “We can draft a good treaty,” Levi growled as he wadded up the letter, “but when those Lancaster lawyers James Buchanan and Thaddeus Stevens get through with it in Congress, it won’t amount to much.” He saw that treaties were made by men of vision like Major Mercy and administered by mean-spirited men like Mahlon Zendt, and he saw little likelihood that any good would come from this particular one.
He was right. When the treaty reached the United States Senate, that body, without consulting the Indians, arbitrarily reduced the payments from fifty years to ten, then contemptuously refused to ratify the whole. It was rejected before it ever went into effect, and the Indians were left with no secure title to their land.
The man who destroyed even the residue of the treaty never realized what he was doing. In 1857 a thin, medium-sized drifter, thirty years old, haunted the waterfront at St. Louis, volunteering occasionally for odd jobs that developed along the levee. When entertainment boats were there he sometimes collected tickets, but more often he held horses for people visiting the boats or helped slaves unload shipments from Pittsburgh.
He was known as Spade Larkin, from his habit of carrying with him a short-handled miner’s spade, and it was said that he had already crossed the continent twice, once on his way to the gold fields in California empty-handed and once returning in the same condition except for the spade which he had bought in Sacramento. The spell of gold was upon him, for with his own eyes he had seen men no better prepared than he strike veins which had made them famous throughout California, and it was his determination to do the same when the next field opened.
He explained, “I seen it time and again. Them as got the gold were them as got there fust.” He had grown up on a farm in southern Ohio, to which he had no intention of returning. “They’s oney two places a man can live properly, St. Louis or San Francisco,” and of the two he preferred the former.
“The day is gonna come—you will live to see the day, all of you—when I step off’n a Missouri River steamer and tell the cabman, ‘Planters’ House,’ and I’ll have money like you never seen—because it’s out there, just waitin’ to be picked up … if you know the right place to dig.
“Sure, I failed in California,” he often confessed. “Come home with fifty cents and a shovel. But I also come home with an idea. I know how to placer and I know how to dig. I carry this spade so when the next news breaks, I’m off. I got me a piece of paper that tells me where the next big strike is gonna be.” Here he would take from his pocket the oilskin pouch in which he carried his tobacco, and from it he would take a second pouch in which he carried a piece of cardboard onto which was pasted a well-worn clipping from the Missouri Republican of 1845:
Miss Lucinda is not only unusually attractive, with her dark flashing eyes, but she is famed throughout the west as the granddaughter and only heir of Chief Lame Beaver, the Arapaho hero who discovered a gold mine in the Rockies.
Spade was the least surprised man in St. Louis when in 1858 the extraordinary news flashed up and down the Mississippi valley: “Gold discovered in Nebraska Territory at Pikes Peak!” He left St. Louis that night, carrying only his Sacramento spade and a determination to be first at some new field.
He took a steamer to St. Joseph, now a thriving city to which railroads from the east were delivering hundreds of gold-seekers daily. Some had funds to purchase wagons on whose sides they painted “Pikes Peak or Bust,” and others could even employ guides to lead their large trains of horses laden with enough equipment for a year.
Larkin and seven men like him proposed to walk to the Rockies. They would ferry across the Missouri at St. Joe, ask directions to the Platte River and then walk the six hundred miles to the new gold fields. They formed a pitiful brigade, plodding along in the dust raised by the thousands who were riding west. They cadged food where they could, cut timber for other travelers who required it and helped wagons across the Big Blue, still a formidable barrier.
When they reached the Platte they lounged like beggars at Fort Kearny for a couple of days, picking up things that other travelers had disposed of because of overweight, and gearing themselves for the long hike west. They had only one bit of good fortune: because they were headed for the Rockies, they did not have to ford the South Platte. By staying close to its southern bank, they were sure to reach the gold fields.
In their passage they came naturally to Zendt’s Farm, where stones had been laid across the Platte so that travelers could cross over to buy their last stores for the final push to the mountains, and it was here that Spade Larkin, weighing less than a hundred and thirty pounds because of near-starvation on the route, struck his great fortune.
He and five other foot travelers who had persisted to this point limped exhausted into the crowded stockade, and with one glance Spade saw that this store must be making a mint of money. Quietly he discussed with two of his companions the possibility of robbing it, but there were so many armed Indians camped nearby, and so many gold-seekers crowding in that they abandoned the idea. The other five bought a few necessities for the last stage of their journey and passed on, but for some reason Larkin stayed behind, fascinated by the stockade and the tremendous business it was doing.
“You want to help with the travelers?” Levi Zendt asked the drifter.
“Yeah, yeah!” he said. “It’s gold I’m after, but I need a grubstake, too.” So he got the job of carrying goods across the river to those travelers who could not make it to the northern side, and one day as he was packing goods to ferry across the river he happened to hear Zendt refer to his pretty wife as Lucinda, and in a flash he comprehended that this woman, stuck away in a trading store on the South Platte, was the girl in the newspaper story! He quit what he was doing and moved inconspicuously to the outhouse along the riverbank. Secreting himself within its dark and odorous confines, he brought out his tobacco pouch and carefully unfolded the clipping. There were the heady details: “Miss Lucinda … granddaughter and only heir of Chief Lame Beaver … gold mine in the Rockies.”
He returned to work, churning over in his mind various possibilities as to how he might wrest from her the secret of the mine. In the meantime he would go on working as if nothing had changed.
On a winter day in 1860 he returned to the stockade after having gunned down four buffalo cows, from which he had taken the tongues, and as he threw them on the kitchen table he asked Zendt, casually, “You ever know old man McKeag?”
“My partner. We worked together here for seven years.”
“Is it true you married his daughter?”
“That’s right.”
“Is it true that she’s the granddaughter of an Arapaho chief?”
“That’s right.”
“Where’d she grow up?”
“Ask her.”
So Larkin sidled up to Lucinda as she was darning socks and asked, “Is it true that you’re the granddaughter of Chief Lame Beaver?”
“No,” she said, and Larkin’s face fell. Then she laughed and added, “Because he was never a chief.”
“Oh, but you were his granddaughter?”
“He was a great man,” she said quietly.
“Where’d you grow up?”
“Many places. St. Louis, for one.”
“I mean, when your grandfather was alive?”
“He was long dead before I was born.”
“Where did he live?”
“Just about everywhere between Canada and the Arkansas. He never went south of that because of the Comanche. Remember, I’m an Arapaho.”
“I know.” He hesitated, then plunged ahead: “Did he ever live in the mountains?”
“Everybody did. Not the real mountains, but the foothills. The first thing I can remember is living in the mountains. Blue Valley, we called it.”
“What were you doing up there?”
Lucinda stopped her darning and looked at the prospector. “What’s all this questioning, Mr. Larkin?” she asked.
“The newspaper said you were the granddaughter of Chief Lame Beaver.”
“Oh, no! Levi! Levi!” When her husband appeared from the kitchen she laughed pleasantly and said, “Here’s another one who’s heard about grandfather’s gold mine. Tell him the story, because I have to get supper.”
So Levi Zendt told Spade Larkin all he knew about the last days of Lame Beaver, the two gold bullets, the obsession of Pasquinel, and of McKeag’s finding him dead in Blue Valley. “Where is this valley?” Larkin asked, and Levi told him what he had told a dozen others: “You go up the Platte till you reach the fork. Keep right, then take the first fork left and climb fairly high, keeping the little stone beaver to your left. And there it is, blue spruce on one side, yellow aspen on the other and the creek comin’ down the middle.”
“A creek?” Larkin asked.
“Yes. A beautiful creek.”
That night Larkin stole as much as he could carry from the stockade, grabbed his spade and started his solitary hike into the mountains. He was heard of from time to time, prowling the camps that others had pioneered, trying to find a place for himself along streams already overcrowded with men who had got there first. He went as far south as California Gulch, but repeatedly came back to the stream which many had explored without results: Clear Creek in Blue Valley. He pitched his camp there one whole winter, an act of folly, because it was known throughout the mountain area that the stream was barren.
When spring came in 1861 Larkin did not even know that a war was starting which would divide the nation. He had been without human contact for more than six months, and his concern was exclusively with the disintegrating clipping he kept in his tobacco pouch. Now he took it out again, sitting beneath the blue spruce outside his cabin door, and studied its reassuring phrases.
“It’s got to be here!” Larkin said. “This is where Lame Beaver found those bullets.” And with a kind of sullen fury he plunged back into the cold water, slashing at the gravel and uncovering at last a scattering of nuggets.
“Oh, God!” he cried, falling on his knees in the water. “I knew it was here!”
For six weeks he practiced the most cruel discipline. He had found one of the richest placers in Colorado history, and he kept that fact to himself, panning the gravel and secreting the nuggets, because in California he had learned that when a man found a placer, the trick was to locate the vein which threw off the nuggets, for the nuggets were valuable today, but the vein existed forever.
Desperately he looked upstream of his find, but he discovered nothing. For a while he gave up placer mining and devoted his entire attention to the stream banks, praying that he might find the vein which had produced this splendid gold, but it eluded him. He became frenzied, more agitated than in the earlier days when he was searching merely for such gold as he could find in the stream bed. Now that was not enough. He wanted it all, the mother vein, the lode from which the real wealth sprang.
One day in June he saw with despair that another prospector had climbed the stream and was entering Blue Valley. For a moment he considered shooting the man, to preserve the golden secret, but then he thought that probably the man had a partner, and before he could take decisive action the man, a knowing old fellow who could read signs, was upon him and knew that Larkin had found gold. Methodically the old man cut four saplings and staked out ten feet, the allowable portion of stream bank, and proceeded to set up his sieves.
“Name’s Johnson,” he said. “See you found gold.”
“Found nothin’,” Larkin growled.
“Don’t see your stakes,” Johnson said.
“They’re here,” Larkin said, hastily staking out the area just below his original find.
For two days the men worked side by side, grudgingly, for Larkin wanted freedom to search for the vein, and on the third day Johnson struck a rich deposit of nuggets and went berserk. “It’s here!” he yelled, dancing up and down, and before Larkin could stop him or arrange some deal, he was dashing down the mountain to inform Denver of the great strike in Blue Valley.
Within weeks the valley was lined with claims. Three times Spade Larkin had to fight off claim jumpers, and one newcomer said, “The prairies are black with people coming out here.” From all over America and parts of Europe disappointed men who had lost out on previous bonanzas streamed in to try their luck on this great concentration. Each pebble in Clear Creek was turned over at least a score of times, and some men like Johnson took out considerable fortunes.
The valley was gutted. The aspen went early for building flumes, and the blue spruce vanished soon thereafter. The beaver were all killed off, and no deer dared venture from the hills. Huts of the most miserable sort sprang up on every side, and a loaf of bread sold for two dollars. Larkin, holding desperately to his original find, watched it decline week by week until it yielded nothing and he was forced into the indignity of descending from the mountain and going to Levi Zendt, brazenly asking the merchant to stock him with goods which he might peddle in the camp.
While he was gone, a man named Foster, from Illinois, a penniless veteran of the California fields, discovered the mother lode. It lay in a place that Larkin had not even considered, and it yielded $19,000,000, none of which accrued to Larkin, who continued to serve as peddler to the valley.
Now huge structures were erected to monitor the mines, and a railroad climbed up for hauling in food and taking down the gold. For three years this garish valley, without a tree or a house worth living in, poured forth its amazing riches, and then the lode ran out. The men departed and the gaunt dwellings stood vacant. The tipple and the trestles rotted in the sun, and the trains ran no more. Blue Valley became a ghost town, one of the ugliest on earth, with not a single feature to redeem it, and Spade Larkin was forced to turn his back on the grandeur he had uncovered and drift along the streets of Denver, telling newcomers that he was the man, yessiree, he was the man that found Blue Valley, and for a beer he would explain how a newspaper clipping, a little clipping from a St. Louis newspaper, had told him the secret that nobody else had ever been able to find, the secret of Chief Lame Beaver’s lost gold mine. He became quite tedious.
How did so unsavory a man destroy a document as noble in principle as the Treaty of Fort Laramie? When word flashed to Omaha, St. Louis, Pittsburgh and Boston that Spade Larkin had struck one of the richest of all placers in Blue Valley, a prodigious horde of gold-seekers poured into the west, eager to accomplish there what they had been too late to accomplish in California, and most of them used the South Platte route, which took them past Zendt’s Farm, where they spent the last money they had on food and equipment. Each arrival was sure to require a box of physicking pills, a quart of castor oil, two quarts of rum and a large vial of peppermint essence, for only these could cure the “miner’s complaint.” For Levi Zendt these were good years, and like his father-in-law before him, he banked his savings in St. Louis.
For the Indians they were not so good. Some travelers, a trickle at first and then a surge, studied their maps and saw that if they ignored the Platte, which wandered north and south, and chose instead a course due west from Kansas City, they would head straight for the gold fields over flat land and save two hundred miles.
This route was superior in all respects except one: it had no water. Animals perished from thirst and lack of grazing. Men starved to death because the deer and antelope stayed to the north, near the Platte, and the straight line became studded with graves. One party resorted to cannibalism, until only one man survived; Arapaho found him wandering in the waterless country and nursed him back to health.
The new route produced two lasting consequences. First, it brought thousands of emigrants onto land which had previously been considered useless, so that not only did gold-seekers want mining lands in the hills, but truck farmers wanted flat lands from which they could feed the miners. And who owned the lands they sought? A handful of Indians who knew not the meaning of gold or the rules of farming. Bronze-faced men like Lost Eagle kept appearing at the new settlements, complaining of trespass and depredation, and such constant complaining could not be endured for long.
Second, the new route doomed the buffalo. It cut the once-unlimited grazing lands between the Platte and the Arkansas into diminished segments; no longer could huge herds move freely north and south, as they seemed to require for propagation. If the discovery of gold had a devastating effect on the Indians, its effect on the buffalo was fatal. Within a space of time so brief that men would ever after marvel at the depopulation, the buffalo would vanish forever from this region.
Clearly, decisions had to be made, or Indian and gold-seeker would soon be at war. Ironically, the demand for action could not have come at a worse time. In Washington and Fort Leavenworth attention had to be concentrated on the civil war, and few experienced officers could be spared for devising new arrangements with Indians. Men who knew nothing of the west were given the job of managing them, and no attention could be paid as to how it was done.
Without even discussing the situation with the Indians, these men reached an incredible decision: tell the Indians a mistake was made at Fort Laramie, then offer them a new treaty which would give them a small parcel of largely worthless land containing no water, no trees and no buffalo, land whose only redeeming feature was that it could never possibly be desired by white men. And then conclude the new treaty with the solemn assurance that this time when the Great White Father used the phrase “for as long as the waters flow and the grass shall grow,” he meant it.
The brutal task of persuading the Indians to accept such a one-sided revision was handed to Major Mercy, now at the army’s Denver office, and to Indian Agent Albert G. Boone, grandson of old Daniel, who had had his own troubles with Indians.
“I cannot go back to Chief Lost Eagle,” Mercy told his wife, “and announce that the other treaty is finished. Just because we say it’s finished.” He was distressed that his government, without discussion, would void a solemn treaty which he had helped to negotiate, and order him to make it palatable to the persons affected.
“I can’t do it!” he said in their Denver home, and Lisette encouraged him in his defiance.
“It’s disgraceful, Max, and I’d have none of it,” she told him.
Together they drafted a letter to the authorities at Fort Leavenworth, warning of the consequences. The heart of their letter was contained in four propositions:
I. If the terms agreed to at Fort Laramie are unilaterally abrogated, there will be war across the plains. It may be delayed in coming, but it will be inevitable, and it may strike us just when we are most preoccupied elsewhere.
II. If the Arapaho and the Cheyenne are thus defrauded of their rightful lands, word will spread to all tribes throughout the west, and you must expect the Sioux and the Crow to rise in rebellion, for they will read the signal that their lands, too, will soon be taken from them.
III. If our present agreement with the Indians is now broken, as you propose, the settlers will later feel themselves entitled to take whatever lands we give the Indians this time. The rape will continue endlessly and within a dozen years no Indian will remain in this territory.
IV. Since 1851 the Indians have steadfastly fulfilled all obligations, doing nothing to violate the spirit or regulations of the agreement. For us to break the agreement, as you now propose, is morally wrong and a crime against the principle of treaties whereby civilized nations co-exist. That the agreement should be broken by the civilized partner while being honored by the uncivilized is offensive and the consequences should be weighed.
In reply, Major Mercy received the blunt direction: “Proceed as ordered.”
In anguish he turned to the one man who shared his views; he saddled his horse and rode up the Platte to Zendt’s Farm, placing the wicked proposal before Levi. “It means war!” Levi said. Lucinda, when she heard of what was afoot, said apprehensively, “This plays right into the hands of Jake and Broken Thumb,” and Levi posed the most difficult problem of all: “How are you going to explain this to Lost Eagle? And men like him who staked their reputations on the honest intentions of the white man?”
Major Mercy was too distraught to devise any stratagem for handling Lost Eagle, so Lucinda volunteered to ride out to where the Arapaho were camping and to invite the chiefs to the farm.
When they convened Major Mercy started to explain what lay ahead, but his confusion and embarrassment were apparent to the chiefs. He finally sat down and left the job to Levi Zendt, who fumbled along, not hiding his disgust: “In Washington the Great White Father, not the one you met, Lost Eagle, but the other one who won’t be there much longer. His name is Buchanan and he comes from the town I lived in, but he isn’t a very strong man and you can’t depend upon him.”
The chiefs looked at each other and were relieved when Lucinda took over.
“Once more they want to change the treaty,” she said. “They want you to give up all your lands along the Platte, all your lands along the Arkansas, and keep this little corner of land around Rattlesnake Buttes.”
This astonishing statement was greeted by silence. At any time such a brutal proposal would be difficult to absorb, but to hear it coming from three people whom the chiefs could trust was too painful. One chief, Shave Head, rose and stalked from the room.
Finally Lost Eagle asked in a weak voice, “Is this a message from Major Mercy?”
“It is,” the major said sorrowfully.
“What reason can the Great Father possibly have …”
There was to be no answer to this question, for there was a commotion at the door and into the meeting burst the Pasquinel brothers, followed by Shave Head, who had taken them the news.
“Why?” Jake screamed as he rushed up to Mercy. Without waiting for an answer, he turned upon Lost Eagle, shouting dreadful accusations at him.
“Traitor! Old fool who believes everything he’s told! Would-be man without balls!” He was so infuriated with the consequences of Lost Eagle’s leadership that he spit on him, then whipped about, drew out his knife and gashed himself in the left arm.
Flinging the arm about, he splattered blood on all those attending, even his sister Lucinda, after which he screamed in a fury he could not control, “It’s war. It’s death. The terrible day we cannot escape is here.” With that he sped from the room, dashed through the stockade and leaped on his horse, racing to share with the Cheyenne the shameful news.
An ignominious explanation of why the old treaty had to be broken and a new one signed was attempted at a later meeting held at the farm. Agent Boone described in honeyed words the impasse that had arisen. Using the canny type of persuasion practiced by his grandfather, he slowly pointed out that many white men were coming into the area, that they required land too, that the agreement of Fort Laramie had been overgenerous in its gifts because those who wrote it had not comprehended the value of the land—here he paused to stare at Major Mercy, stamping him as a fool—and it was only reasonable that the Great White Father in Washington should ask the Cheyenne and the Arapaho to share the prairie with the white man.
“He wants it all!” Shave Head protested.
Agent Boone ignored this unjust accusation and continued in his bland, conciliatory way. The Great White Father was by no means—not at all—unmindful of his responsibility to his red brothers, and in exchange for their land he was offering them many wonderful gifts: money, each man to get forty acres of new land containing timber and water, farm implements so that they would no longer have to hunt buffalo, seeds and other allurements. His voice fell to a deep religious timbre as he concluded, “The land belongs not to you but to God. He allows you to have it only so long as you cultivate it. He does not want you to roam over it carelessly. He wants you to settle down and farm it, each man with his own fields.”
“How much is forty acres?” Broken Thumb asked, and the whole party stepped out into the open, but when the dimensions were indicated, the Indians began to laugh. “Forty acres at Rattlesnake Buttes!” Broken Thumb cried. “That won’t be enough to feed one buffalo calf.”
Agent Boone returned to his deep religious voice, assuring the Indians that to the east, in states like Ohio and Illinois, many American farmers built a good life on forty acres.
“Have they water?” Broken Thumb asked. “Trees? Good earth?”
“An honest farmer uses what land he has,” Boone replied.
“Where will we find our water?” Broken Thumb demanded.
Boone replied that wherever there was a stream, and wherever timber could be found, the Indians would receive their portion, to which Broken Thumb properly replied, “But you and I know there are no trees, there are no streams,” and Boone answered, “But if there were, they would be yours.”
Chief Shave Head asked, “Will our lands touch the great Platte River?” and Boone replied, “The Great White Father thinks it best that the Indian lands not reach down to the river, because the white men prefer to travel along the river and trouble might develop.”
“Then where do we get our water?” a third chief asked, and Boone replied, “I am sure some will be found somewhere.”
It was a pitiful meeting, one of the most shameful the government of the United States had ever engaged in. The only plausible excuse was that the nation was preoccupied with its fratricidal war, but the fact remains that this abominable document was crammed down the throats of two of the finest tribes that roamed the west.
It was accepted only because Lost Eagle pleaded with his people to make one last try to live in peace with the white man. So eloquent was his speech that Agent Boone, in gratitude, handed him a bronze medal containing a bas-relief of President Buchanan, while clever soldiers passed among the other Indians, giving them leftover campaign buttons from the 1856 presidential campaign, each with a grim-faced portrait of the Great White Father, James Buchanan. In subsequent years braves would trade two horses for one of these Buchanans.
Broken Thumb and the Pasquinel brothers encouraged a good half of the Arapaho and Cheyenne to reject the treaty, so they received no buttons and treated with scorn those who had accepted them.
Now came the bad years. The followers of Lost Eagle found themselves crammed onto a reservation one-sixteenth as large as the area they had previously occupied, with no timber and no access to water. “But,” as government officials liked to point out, “in times past your people inhabited the lands around Rattlesnake Buttes.” To this, Lost Beaver replied, “True, but in those days only a few camped here at a time, and the herds of buffalo were so great they could not be counted.”
Today there were few buffalo. In some seasons none wandered into the camp area and real hunger prevailed. It perplexed the Indians to see white men, their bellies filled with food brought from St. Louis, slaughtering what buffalo did remain for only the hides and tallow, leaving the meat to rot in the sun. Indians needed the meat if they were to survive.
The year 1863 was marked by actual starvation; the Indians would remember it as “the year of hunger.” The buffalo did not appear, and even the most extensive forays to the north failed to find them. The chains of pemmican were gone by early February and the other meager supplies had to be severely rationed. On the streets of Denver half-starved Arapaho children hung about livery stables, fighting for the grains of corn that dribbled from the horses’ mouths.
The farm tools which had been promised if the Indians signed the treaty never materialized. Swindling agents stole them, sold them to their friends, and then directed the Indians where to buy them, with “annuity” money they had never received. Ammunition promised for the hunt was withheld on the logical ground that if the starvation became worse, the Indians might shoot at white settlements in their search for food. Once-proud Arapaho were forced to beg for food from any white they saw, and they would often appear at the side of a wagon train, terrifying the occupants, who expected to be scalped. But this was not the Indians’ intent, and during this terrible year they took only such food as they could find. Malnutrition made them highly susceptible to disease, with diarrhea and whooping cough killing off many of the children. Fortunately, some of the older Arapaho died of sheer starvation—those over fifty—and the food they would have consumed enabled the younger warriors to survive.
It was also a year of incipient revolt, for Chief Broken Thumb, now a mature forty-seven and a responsible leader, grew increasingly bitter about the lack of food. In frustration he traveled from one group to the next, trying to determine what the tribes ought to do. Wherever he went he found the younger warriors preparing for war.
“We will not die in silence,” they told him, and he replied, “If things are not better by next summer, we will have to fight.” At one meeting he said, “Our first blow will be to kill everyone at Fort Laramie and take the stores.” One young brave warned, “Not Fort Laramie, it’s too strong.” But Broken Thumb called upon Jake Pasquinel to describe developments along the Platte, and Jake said, “They are moving all soldiers east to fight in the other war. There’s practically no one left at the fort.” Another young brave asked, “Why not take Zendt’s Farm too! There’s food there,” but Jake forestalled such talk: “They’ve been good to us. We’ll leave them alone.”
So the talk always came back to an assault on Fort Laramie, and Jake found that the young braves no longer thought of the cannon as demons that roared when they were wakened. They knew that they were four-inch weapons which required three bags of black powder and much tamping, and when they fired they could wipe out a whole band of Indians, but this was starving time and the cannon would have to be faced. Jake assured them, “There are ways to silence cannon.”
At his office for Indian affairs in Denver, Major Mercy followed the growing agitation with real fear. In vain he endeavored to alert his superiors at Fort Leavenworth to the true state of affairs, but found that they had no time for trivial matters like minor Indian uprisings. Indeed, their concern was how they might siphon off still more troops for the Richmond front, where Union forces were suffering one defeat after another, with enormous casualties. But even when confronted by this indifference Mercy felt obligated to place the facts on record, and he reported:
I have known these tribes since before the Mexican War, and I assure you that never have they been in more sorry condition. Their buffalo are gone, so they starve. The robes from the buffalo have been sent to St. Louis, so they shiver. Promise after promise of food to eat and guns for shooting smaller game have been made by our government, and broken. I am not disturbed by what I am reporting. I am terrified. If remedial steps are not taken immediately, there has got to be insurrection across the prairie next summer, and all communication will be broken. Such forts as we have will not be able to hold out more than a week.
Let me cite but one instance, which will be more eloquent than my guessing as to possibilities. The other day I happened to be riding on the left bank of the Platte and I came to a tree in which a platform had been built such as the children of a great Indian warrior build for his burial, and it was obvious to me from the adornments that some notable chief had died, but as I passed I saw the legs of the corpse move, and upon inspection I found that it was my old friend from 1851, Chief Lean Bear of the Cheyenne, a good friend of the United States. There being no food in his camp, he had taken himself away, and had buried himself so that the younger could eat.
Sir, the Indians are starving to death, and we must do something.
Maxwell Mercy, Major, USA
4 November 1863
A deadly escalation now began, and it would be fruitless to recite each incident that accelerated it. More white people kept crowding into Colorado, and they demanded more land. When a farmer took his land he insisted that Indians and buffalo be kept off. And when the Indians were constantly restricted, without food and sometimes even without water, intolerable things simply had to happen.
On December 19, 1863, two would-be prospectors headed west over the bleak central route from Kansas City direct to Denver. They ran out of water and food and were starving. Two more days and they would be dead. They were men from the Mississippi River region of Missouri who from their youth had both feared and hated Indians, so when in their extremity they saw five Indians riding past, apparently well fed, they had no compunction in gunning down two of them and wounding one of the others as they fled. Their tactic was successful, for on the dead Indians they found some pemmican, which kept them alive. When they reached Denver and recited their adventures, a newspaper reported the affair as one more example of superior American ingenuity:
Sam Hazel and Virgil Tompkins of Missouri gave an example of quick thinking two weeks ago as they were about to perish at the Kansas-Colorado border. They spotted five Indians about to attack them, and before the redskins could launch their screaming, bloodcurdling charge, Sam and Virgil neatly dropped two of them, and found on their dead bodies enough pemmican to keep going. Nice work, Sam and Virgil. You are the kind of stalwart men this great Territory needs, and let the nervous sisters back east bother about their own problems. We’ll take care of the Indians.
On March 26, 1864, a band of Indians from the tribe to which the two murdered braves belonged swept down upon a defenseless farm along the South Platte and killed two white men, lifting their scalps and taking three white women captive. This incident, which had long been feared by settlers along the Platte, threw the white community from Omaha to Denver into consternation, and men talked of forming a militia to control the savages.
On April 3, 1864, another farmer along the Platte found one of his good horses missing and signs that Indians might have been operating in the vicinity. Other farmers said they thought the horse might have been the one they saw grazing on the north bank of the Platte, but Lieutenant Abel Tanner with his group of forty cavalrymen from Denver inspected the site and concluded that it must have been Indians. They therefore authorized a punitive expedition, an abhorrent agency much used in the west, where the phrase meant “we have no idea who committed the offense, so we shall gun down any Indian we meet.” When Tanner and his men came upon a group of Arapaho whose tipis were pitched a few miles from the established reservation, they surrounded it and executed forty-three men, women and children. When the last tipi was burned, the soldiers divided among themselves the horses and booty that remained. Of this action a Denver paper wrote:
Forty-three dead Indians for one missing horse might seem excessive to our weak sisters in Vermont and Pennsylvania, the ones who are always telling us how to handle our Indians, but to those of us who have to live with Lo at close quarters, it is clear that only the most stern reprisals will keep him from slaughtering all white men along the Platte. To Lieutenant Tanner, who shows signs of becoming the best Indian fighter in the west, well done! To his brave cohorts, well done, lads, and keep up the good work.
The use of Lo as a description for the Indian was universal in the west and came about because the English poet, Alexander Pope, in his rhymed Essay on Man, introduced these thoughtful lines:
Hope springs eternal in the human breast;
Man never is, but always to be blest …
Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutored mind
Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind …
Many newspapers, such as the Zendt’s Farm Clarion, recently launched by settlers who had built their homes within the shadow of the stockade, used the whole phrase, Lo, the poor Indian, but more sophisticated papers preferred the simpler Lo.
On June 18, 1864, a band of Indians swept down upon the South Platte road, killed four wagoners, scalped them and stole the provisions they were carrying. For six weeks no traffic passed along the road, no news from the east reached Denver. With merchandise blocked by the Indians, prices soared throughout Colorado, with flour rising from nine dollars a barrel to sixteen dollars to twenty-four in a three-week period. As omens of the evil days ahead, a plague of locusts devoured crops along the Platte and the river rose in flood, submerging a good portion of Denver.
A fearful quiet settled over the region, with white men afraid to venture far from their homes and with streets in the city barricaded against possible invasion. When rumors of a beginning assault flashed through the city, citizens broke into the army ordnance warehouse and commandeered rifles, then patrolled the streets. This was not childish apprehension but an understandable fear that Indians might soon be invading the city. After all, Colorado had fewer than three hundred soldiers to protect the whole territory, and if the Indians wanted to pick off isolated farms, they could do so almost at will.
On July 26, 1864, a rancher living east of the village of Zendt’s Farm saw Indians making off with two of his cows, which they slaughtered four miles from his home. This time there was no uncertainty as to what had happened or who the culprits were, so once more Lieutenant Tanner and his riders scoured the prairie and once more they encountered a community of tipis pitched where they should not have been. It was hardly likely that the cow-stealers were lodged in this particular place, but Tanner and his men surrounded it and with a howitzer gunned down forty-seven Indians.
On August 13, 1864, a small band of unidentified Indians overran a peaceful farm some miles east of Denver and slaughtered one of the most attractive white families in the region, Clifford and Belle Barley and their two children. All were brutally killed, their bodies abused and then scalped. Their corpses were hauled in to Denver and put on display under the hand-lettered sign:
THIS IS WHAT AWAITS ALL OF US
UNLESS WE DO SOMETHING
The bodies of the children, dreadfully mutilated, caused men and women alike to burst into tears, and families from remote areas were brought for safekeeping into Denver, where they further inflamed public opinion with their own rumors of Indian horrors. The fear which had lain over the city for some months now crystallized into terror, and men began to talk in whispers of the only alternative they saw before them: “We may have to exterminate the Indians … wipe them out.”
Such whispers reached Lisette Mercy, and she was filled with consternation, for during these bad times she had formed the habit of taking food and clothing to the Arapaho one mile east of Denver. For generations the Indians had camped at this site, near where Cherry Creek ran into the South Platte, and they saw no reason to alter their habits now. Chief Lost Eagle, along with several hundred of his people, pitched their tipis there frequently and met with Denver businessmen who wanted to discuss the future of the area. After all, he had visited President Fillmore following Fort Laramie, and with President Lincoln after the Treaty of 1861. Photographers had taken his portrait with each President, and the one with Lincoln showed two deeply worried men; it was difficult to guess which bore the greater burden: Lincoln, whose nation was being torn apart, or Lost Eagle, whose people were being exterminated.
Lisette Mercy liked Lost Eagle. She found him a compassionate man who desperately wanted to do the right thing but whose ventures seemed always to go astray. He was fifty-four years old now and his influence among his people was greatly diminished; they were listening to Broken Thumb and the young firebrands. The situation had become so desperate that skirmishes were occurring between the followers of the two leaders.
When the Barley massacre occurred Lost Eagle wanted to hurry in to Denver to explain that it was an irresponsible act, one that decent Indians could not condone, but he was met at the edge of the city by armed militiamen who warned him, “We don’t want no Indians in here, not even you,” and he was turned away from land that he had once owned.
Lisette got to him in his tipi, bringing with her a clipping from the Zendt’s Farm Clarion:
The die is cast. By the horrible killings of the Barley family the Indians throw down the gauntlet and challenge us to war. Let us have war, and let us have it now. Nothing less than a few months of punitive raids against the red devils will bring peace. Let us show Lo, the poor Indian once and for all who these prairies belong to. Fight, we say. And fight we would except for the vacuum of leadership in Denver.
“My husband tries his best to make the people see the truth,” Lisette told the old chieftain, “but we have no leadership, so nothing is done.” They both felt a sense of deepening despair, Lost Eagle because he could no longer direct his people in conciliatory paths, Lisette Mercy because she saw how ineffective her husband was in trying to provide leadership at a time when only a vacuum existed.
In politics, as in nature, a vacuum cannot long be tolerated; and two men were headed for Denver who would fill the void in startling manner. The first was the soft-spoken fifty-five-year-old one-armed general from Vermont, Laban Asher, who had led his volunteers with prudence and gallantry during some of the worst battles of the Civil War. At Vicksburg, the previous year, he had lost his right arm; his associates said that if he had charged more resolutely, he would have been far from where the bullet struck and would have taken one of the heights as well, but in his plodding way, with his arm dangling and blood spurting from beneath the tourniquet, he got his men to the ridge on time, and with far less loss of life than would have been incurred under some of the more heroic generals.
His job was now to bring some kind of order to Colorado Territory while defending it against possible incursions by Confederate adventurers who roamed the west. He was in Denver only two weeks when word reached him that Desperado Jim Reynolds, a Confederate renegade, was storming through the Arkansas River valley, threatening communications and trying to raise levies for an attack on Denver.
“Let there be no misunderstanding,” General Asher said firmly. “My first duty is to keep this territory in Union hands.” Without hesitation he dispatched what few troops he had to the south, where Reynolds and four of his men were captured and executed.
Belatedly General Asher turned his attention to the Indian problem, with the newspapers and the business leaders supporting Lieutenant Tanner in calling for war and only Major Mercy counseling a more cautious approach.
Intuitively Asher sided with Mercy. He liked him, perhaps because he, too, had been wounded in the service of his country, so that his patriotism could not be challenged; or it might have been Mercy’s calm cast of mind that Asher admired. The two men worked well together and began to devise a strategy for moving the Indians away from major trails and providing them with access to water. “We’ve also got to feed them,” Asher said one day, “now and for as far into the future as we can see. They won’t become farmers overnight. It’ll require two decades to teach them, and if they’re to learn, they’ll need better land. So feed them we must.”
When news of this proposal leaked out, the Colorado newspapers exploded. The Clarion led the way with a savage article:
Now the dreamer from Vermont tells us, “You must feed Lo, and be kind to him, and forget that he has slaughtered your fellow farmers like the savage he is.” He tells us this when our food prices have soared because Lo has cut off our freight and mail services. Well, we say to General Laban Asher, “Go back to Vermont with your one arm and blind eyes and leave the settlement of the Indian problem to real men who understand the issues, men like Lieutenant Abel Tanner, who knows how to shoot them up till they behave.” We say, “Give Tanner a hundred trusted men on good horses and he will settle the Indian problem in two weeks.” And he won’t do it by feeding them at public expense.
“What can I do against such tactics?” Asher asked in his soft voice. He was a New England gentleman who refused to dirty himself with public brawling; he was an army officer who did not know how to respond when newspapers kept calling for the promotion of an inept subordinate like Tanner.
“First off,” Mercy advised, “send Tanner back east … tonight. They’re calling for fighters there. Let him fight.”
“No,” Asher said cautiously, “if I do that, the newspapers will crucify me.” He paced back and forth, and for the first time Mercy noticed that the loss of the arm threw the concerned little man somewhat off balance. He had not yet learned to compensate for the missing limb, and in some strange way this made him insecure. Mercy’s limp had made him more daring, as if his spared life had to be used constructively, and now he said, “General Asher, you have all the right ideas. You must act upon them forcefully.”
But Asher drew back. “Instinct tells me to play for time. Already some of the Indians are asking for tools for farming. A little more time and this public anxiety will subside. Then we can act.”
There would be no time. In January 1864 there was a man on his way to Denver who possessed a clear vision of how the west was to be and the determination to shape it to that definition.
He was a tall man, six-feet-two, forty-eight years old, broad of shoulder and piercing of eye. He was clean-shaven, and stood so erect that he seemed even taller than he was. He was heavy, from good eating, and he had a strong voice with a peculiar penetrating quality which made it carry over a hundred lesser voices, even if all were talking. He did not speak overmuch, and when he did, it was with a Jovian kind of finality, as if he had long considered lesser alternatives and dismissed them.
He was Frank Skimmerhorn, from some old family of Schermerhorns, no doubt, and he came from Minnesota. There, in the years 1861–62 he had become acquainted at first hand with Indian problems, for the Sioux, irritated by some minor alteration in procedures, had run wild and killed his parents, his wife and his daughter. A farm which had been worth twenty thousand dollars had been left desolated, and he had moved homeless from one Minnesota town to the next, hearing the terrible stories of damage done by the Sioux—a hundred ranches burned, two hundred people scalped, a whole section of the nation in disarray, and all because of a few fractious Indians.
He left Minnesota with his son, satisfied never to return. Rights to his farmland he had sold for fifteen hundred dollars, and with this he had returned to his childhood home in Nauvoo, Illinois, where he tried to piece together for himself an explanation of what he had seen during the Indian uprising, and one night after a church meeting it had all been made clear.
A farmer who had lived in Nauvoo all his life said, “I never cared for the Mormons. Now understand, I didn’t go to war against them the way some of my neighbors did, and I never put fire to their barns. But as a people they don’t please me, and their idea of one man having fifty-three wives, which they did. Yes, they did …” He lost his thread and leaned against his carriage. “What was my point, Skimmerhorn?”
“You didn’t cotton to the Mormons.”
“Yes. Like I was sayin’, I could certainly not be called their defender, but they did have one idea that made a lot of sense, a lot of good common sense.” He paused here to let that sink in, and Skimmerhorn asked obligingly, “What was it?”
“They had done a lot of serious study about the Indians. Sounded a good deal like you, when they talked. Confused as to who the Indians were and why they behaved in the unchristian way they did. And then it came to them in a prophecy kind of. God sent them a message sayin’ that the Indians were really Lamanites, the Lost Tribes of Israel. Yessir, way back in the year 722 B.C. when the Assyrian King Sargon took ’em into bondage … ten tribes … they never got back to Israel … just wandered about the world.”
“That’s very interesting,” Skimmerhorn said.
“You know it’s true,” his informant continued enthusiastically. “The Indian medicine lodge, for example, with all that mysterious going-on. What is it really? The tabernacle of the Lost Tribes. And you talk about sackcloth and ashes in the Bible. Don’t the Indians mourn by cutting their hair and slashing their arms? Seems clear to me they’re Jews.”
“That would explain why they’re so hellish,” Skimmerhorn said, grasping his informant by the arm. “You said they were Lamanites? Now, just what does that mean?”
“I’m not a Mormon, you understand, but I’ve had my brushes with the Indians, so I listened, and as near as I could make out, the Lamanites were God’s name for the Lost Tribes, and because they had known God and turned their backs on Him, he put a powerful curse on them, and darkened their faces, and turned all men against them. Skimmerhorn, if they knew God and rejected Him, it’s our duty to hunt them down and slay them. It’s our bounden duty.”
For some days Frank Skimmerhorn pondered this matter of the Lamanites, and he asked throughout Nauvoo for other recollections the villagers might have as to what exactly the Mormons had said during their unhappy stay there on their way to Salt Lake City, and he came up with a profound body of confirmation. The Indians really were the Ten Lost Tribes. They had been led to America by the Prophet Lehi and their faces had been darkened because of their sin in rejecting the Lord. To exterminate them was both a duty and an exaltation. They were an abomination to honest men, and the sooner they were wiped from the face of the earth, the better.
In a dream, brought on perhaps by too much listening and too much brooding on this problem, Frank Skimmerhorn saw that he was destined to go to Colorado, where the Indians were causing trouble among the gold-seekers, and put an end to that trouble. It was more than an invitation; it was a command. In the Clarion he wrote:
Patient men across this great United States have racked their brains trying to work out some solution for the Indian problem, and at last the answer stands forth so clear that any man even with one eye can see it. The Indian must be exterminated. He has no right to usurp the land that God intended us to make fruitful. He has no right to chase buffalo over fields that we wish to plough, and the only logical answer to his depredation is total extermination. He and his ugly squaws and his criminal children must be exterminated, and the sooner this Territory gets about the job, the better. Today everyone cries, “Make Colorado a state!” Only when we have rid ourselves of the red devils will we earn the right to join the other states with honor. Extermination must be our battle cry.
This letter was widely reprinted throughout the gold fields of Colorado, and men of all political persuasions began telling one another, “That feller from Minnesota, Skimmerhorn, he makes a lot of sense,” and when Skimmerhorn followed with letters detailing how a determined militia could kill off the Arapaho and Cheyenne, others throughout the territory supported his policy of total extermination.
Of the public figures, only three dared speak out against this inhuman proposal. An Episcopal minister in Denver called it murder and got into trouble with his congregation, who had seen the four scalped bodies of the Barley family. General Asher pointed out that it was not the habit of the United States Army to sanction mass murder, and he was excoriated as a coward who refused to face up to facts. And Major Mercy cautioned against so brutal an action as the planned extermination of a body of people, only a few of whom had committed any crime and all of whom had had crimes committed against them. Skimmerhorn of course did not agree and launched a series of savage letters against him:
Who is this so-called Major Mercy? A limping coward who shot himself in the hip at Chapultepec so he wouldn’t have to fight in our present war against the rebels. Who are his friends? All the Indian-lovers in the west, all the lily-livered cowards who are afraid to do God’s work in protecting this land against savages. And most important, who are his relatives? The Pasquinel brothers, of shameful report, are his brothers. He is married to their sister and he is more of an Arapaho than they are. I say, “Colorado should be rid of this cowardly traitor,” and I give him warning that if he continues to spout his defense of the Indian, honest patriots are going to shoot him down in the streets of Denver.
Appalled as Mercy was by such invective, he nevertheless pleaded with his wife to avoid any public comment that might evoke further debate, but she was too much like her mother to allow such rantings to go unchallenged. Trailing Skimmerhorn from one Denver boarding house to the next, she finally found him in a hotel on Larimer Street and castigated him publicly.
Her agitation delighted Skimmerhorn, for it provided him with an additional target. He loosed a blast of his pen at her, and this, too, was carried in the papers, allowing him to recapitulate his basic theory that every Indian in the territory must be slain.
Such inflammatory statements brought the citizens to fever pitch, and they demanded military action. Unfortunately, no federal troops were available in the west, so a local militia had to be conscripted, with Colonel Frank Skimmerhorn as officer in charge. Promptly he declared martial law, promulgating these harsh directives:
All Indians who wish to remain friendly are to report within twenty days to one of the undersigned locations and lay down their guns.
After twenty days, any Indian encountered anywhere may be shot on sight.
Any material possessions found on a dead Indian belong to the man who brought him to his rightful end.
Frank Skimmerhorn
Colonel, Special Militia
The day after this order was broadcast, old Chief Lean Bear, whom Major Mercy had rescued from self-starvation, assembled a group of seven Arapaho, old women and old men who knew the folly of trying to fight any further. Under a white flag they marched to a surrender point in Denver, where Lieutenant Tanner shot the old man through the heart and sent the others scattering.
When General Asher heard of this outrage he summoned Colonel Skimmerhorn, intending to give him military hell, but as he spoke he noticed that the colonel was not standing at attention and was indeed smirking. “Skimmerhorn!” he cried as loudly as his breeding would permit. “Attention!”
The militiaman ignored the command and said scornfully, “General, your days here are numbered.”
“Colonel!”
“I have friends in Leavenworth. And influential people in this territory have been sending them reports that you’re not the man to deal with the Indians.”
“Skimmerhorn!” the slim general shouted.
“So if you’re wise, Asher, you’ll pack for a trip to Leavenworth and let me run this Indian war.”
“You’ll take no action unless I order it,” Asher said slowly, his voice trembling.
“You’re the commanding general,” Skimmerhorn said insolently. “For the present.”
General Asher was not accustomed to working with men who showed such disregard for military discipline, and he realized that with someone like Skimmerhorn his personal authority had no effect, so he decided to try ordinary reasoning. “We all know,” he said compassionately, “that in Minnesota you suffered at the hands of the Indians. But really, Skimmerhorn, you mustn’t allow the deaths of your parents …”
“Parents?” Skimmerhorn exploded, and it became obvious that he was prey to some kind of insanity. “Yes, I saw my father shot by the Sioux. I was running from the barn when they killed my mother with a tomahawk. But what of my wife? They shot her twenty times … thirty … they scalped her. And my daughter. Nine years old … curly hair … you ever see a child nine years old scalped?” He became a monolithic block of hatred, his face distorted and his hands rigid. “You leave the Lamanites to me,” he cried. “I’ll discharge God’s duty.”
He stalked from the office, leaving Asher slumped in his chair. Pressing his one hand to his forehead, the general had to acknowledge that during this period of civil war he had no way to discipline the madman, and by the time the war ended, Skimmerhorn would be a hero and there would still be no possibility of discipline. His only hope was that Skimmerhorn’s friends at Fort Leavenworth might arrange quickly for his recall, because in Denver there was nothing he could do. He had been beaten by an adversary he could not comprehend.
The Arapaho and Cheyenne were required by law to enter a restricted camping area north of Rattlesnake Buttes, and there the pitiful remnant gathered. They had no food, little clothing, no buffalo grazing nearby, few rifles. As a gesture of good intention they turned over to the military the three white women they had kidnapped from a farm.
They were willing to place themselves under the protection of the army because of the persuasive arguments of Lost Eagle, who told them, “All men would like to stay out with Broken Thumb and wage prairie war as we have always done against our enemies, but I tell you that time is past. General Asher is our friend, Major Mercy is our friend, and he tells me that things will soon be better.”
When the major rode north to inspect the improvised camp, he stopped first at the village of Zendt’s Farm, because he wanted to ascertain local reactions. Riding down the main street, he pulled up before the stockade and at the gateway shouted, “Levi! I need to talk with you.”
From the log house Zendt and Lucinda appeared, and Mercy cried, “Where is this insanity leading us?” but before Levi could reply, he heard a sound of bugles and in a moment Colonel Skimmerhorn rode up, leading sixteen of his militia, who assumed a military stance at the gate.
“This fort is under arrest,” he announced loudly. “Zendt, you’ve been consorting with the enemy and everyone is ordered to stay inside until I give a command to the contrary.” Spurring his prancing horse, he shouted, “Sergeant, shoot anyone who tries to escape. That’s an order.”
Turning to Major Mercy, Skimmerhorn cried, “I knew I’d find you here. Sergeant, note that Major Mercy was consorting with traitors.”
When Levi heard the extraordinary commands that Skimmerhorn had issued, he tried to argue with him, but from his horse Skimmerhorn replied with scorn, “I do not converse with fucking squaw men.”
Zendt leaped at him, but Skimmerhorn pulled back and cut at him with his sword. When Major Mercy led the bleeding Dutchman away, the colonel cried, “Sergeant, take note that the squaw man Zendt attacked me with intent to kill and that I repulsed him with my saber.” Leaving a detachment to guard the stockade, he rode back to Denver, already developing the plans which would rid Colorado permanently of its Indians.
When he was gone, Major Mercy made a fateful decision. Aware that what he was about to do might involve him in a court-martial, he told Levi, “I’m convinced that damn fool had no authority to order my house arrest, and I propose to ignore it.” Taking Lucinda by the hand, he said, “That maniac has some crazy idea of wiping out the whole Indian race. He’ll probably start with the camp. I’ve got to warn General Asher.”
Zendt tried to calm him. “The Indians in the camp have no guns. There’d be no reason to attack them.”
“Skimmerhorn might attack anything,” Mercy warned. “He’s convinced he’s doing God’s work.”
“More likely he’s going to chase down the ones who didn’t turn themselves in—Broken Thumb and his young braves.”
This reasoning did not satisfy Mercy, so he devised an escape which involved Zendt’s appearing at the gate while he slipped over the northeast wall. But as he started to head south to alert General Asher, he changed his mind. Instead, he goaded the horse to the northeast toward the Indian camp at the buttes.
He reached the buttes at dusk, approaching from the south, and when he rode to high ground between them he saw in the declivity to the north a confused mass of tipis thrown helter-skelter across the area where neat Indian camps had formerly stood. He thought how difficult it must be for the chiefs who had once led their people across limitless grasslands to be cooped up in such a depression, with chalk hills hemming them in.
He whistled as a signal to the outlooks who must be hidden somewhere in the rocks, but none appeared, and he realized that this tatterdemalion group was without organization or guards.
When he had descended almost to the camp, two Arapaho on foot came to inspect him, and he asked, “Where are your ponies?” and they replied, “All gone.”
They recognized him as a friend of their tribe and took him to the lodge where the chiefs sat glumly discussing stratagems whereby they might get food for their starving people. That night Mercy stayed at the encampment, warning the Indians to give Colonel Skimmerhorn no excuse for attacking them.
“We have no guns,” Lost Eagle said.
“I didn’t mean guns,” Mercy explained. “Skimmerhorn’s a madman. He’ll use any pretext.”
“We’ve done everything General Asher told us,” Lost Eagle said pathetically.
“Steal no cows,” Mercy explained. “If a white man comes through your camp, let him go in peace, no matter what he does.”
“Without arms,” Lost Eagle said, “we couldn’t make trouble if we wanted to.”
Talk turned to more pressing matters. “When will we get food?” Chief Black Knee of the Cheyenne asked.
“It’s being discussed,” Mercy said lamely.
“Discussed! We’re starving, Mercy. Our shame is as big as the earth.”
Every promise made by General Asher had been frustrated by Colonel Skimmerhorn. Every assurance of supplies that he, Mercy, had given these patient men had been countermanded. Two tribes who had been as faithful to their treaties as any in America were being systematically starved, after first being deprived of their land, their buffalo and their guns. Now they were being bedeviled by a maniacal civilian playing at being a soldier, and no one in authority had the courage or the inclination to call a halt. It was the darkest hour in Mercy’s life, worse even than when he was left alone at Chapultepec, his companions seeing the blood and thinking him dead.
For the first time he was not proud to be an American soldier. The trickery whereby the ample agreement of 1851 was replaced by the niggardly provisions of 1861 could be accepted. Maybe adjustments were necessary. He no longer accused Commissioner Boone of double dealing with the Indians; white men required land, and they wanted to own the streams along which gold was found, and that was that.
But the present behavior of the American government was despicable, and he proposed saying so as soon as he got back to Denver. To coop up more than fourteen hundred Indians in a rock-rimmed meadow lacking water and to leave them there without food was insupportable, and he was convinced that if the real army in Leavenworth or Washington knew of it, they would demand instant reforms. He must bring the facts to their attention.
He told Lost Eagle, “Trust me one more time. Hold off any action till I get back.”
“We listen, Mercy,” the old chief said. The lines down his cheeks were deeper now, the eyes more sunken, but the rocklike face was still one of surpassing dignity. In recent weeks he had absorbed much abuse thrown at him by young braves who refused to accept starvation any longer, but the only star he knew was to trust the white man. Men like Major Mercy and General Asher would produce food and some kind of control over Colonel Skimmerhorn.
“Until the new year comes, we will trust you,” he said.
“Where are Jake Pasquinel and Broken Thumb?” Mercy asked as he prepared to depart.
“East, toward Julesburg,” Chief Black Knee said, and he gave Mercy two scouts to guide him to where the dissidents were holed up.
It was snowing when Mercy left Rattlesnake Buttes, and at the rise he looked back upon this forlorn collection of tipis, this assemblage of men and women without hope, and swore that he would try to restore some dignity to them.
How beautiful the Platte valley was that day, white with snow along the banks and shimmering black where the dark waters ran. Ice had not yet formed, and the wagon trail which led from Julesburg to Denver would still be passable. In some ways, Mercy thought, this was the Platte at its finest, for its innumerable islands achieved a certain beauty as their sandy faces lay covered with snow.
We should be able to share a river like this with the Indians, he told himself as the guides led him farther eastward, but when he reached the rude encampment where Broken Thumb had assembled his braves and saw their pitiful condition, he realized that arguing intelligently with them would be difficult.
Dismounting, he limped across the snow-crisp ground and asked a woman for Broken Thumb. Insolently she pointed at a gray-brown tipi which had lost its two poles for controlling smoke. No matter, there was no wood for a fire.
Pushing aside the flap, he said, “Broken Thumb, I have come to beg you not to make war against the wagons.”
“We’re starving,” the Cheyenne said. “The wagons have food.”
“The next two months are desperate,” he pleaded.
“We’re desperate now.”
“Where’s Jake Pasquinel?”
“Out trying to find food.”
“Oh, God!” Mercy groaned. He could see Jake doing some foolish thing, bringing the whole wrath of Skimmerhorn down upon him. Jake would come back with beef from a cow he had killed, or beans he had stolen from a rancher who would even now be posting to Denver to complain. As Mercy tried to anticipate the foreboding possibilities, Broken Thumb called for a boy to fetch the piece of paper which the Indians had taken from a wagon heading eastward. One of the young braves had been able to read it, and a summary had passed among all the warriors at the hidden camp. It was a clipping from the Clarion:
At last a military officer in this Territory makes sense. At last a true hero has stepped forward to tell us what we have been eager to hear. On a visit to our fair city Colonel Frank Skimmerhorn told a group of his admirers, “The hour is at hand when decency and fear of God shall again return to this Territory. The hour is almost upon us when every stinking, sneaking, crawling, sniveling, filthy Red Man in Colorado will be either killed or driven from our boundaries. At the long-awaited hour we shall expect every red-blooded man who loves his home to join us in exterminating once and forever the menace that has threatened us for so long.” Fine words, Colonel. We’re behind you. In forthcoming fights we hope our soldiers will not be encumbered with Indian prisoners. And we hope what you said was heard at various stockades around here where Indians are allowed to associate freely with white men and where dastardly plots against our freedom are hourly hatched.
Chief Broken Thumb, now a man of forty-eight without illusions, drew his thin blanket about his shoulders and pointed to the clipping. “Why do you tell me ‘Don’t make war?’ Skimmerhorn makes war, every day.”
“General Asher will take care of Skimmerhorn, I promise you.”
At this the Cheyenne warrior, who knew a good deal about soldiers, burst into derisive laughter. Leaping to his feet and making believe he had but one arm, he minced about the tipi, throwing out contradictory orders and giving a strangely realistic impression of the befuddled general. “He will do nothing,” Broken Thumb said.
“I will,” Mercy promised.
Before Broken Thumb could respond, Jake Pasquinel broke into the tipi, and when he saw Mercy he moved swiftly toward him and embraced him, a most unusual gesture for this unyielding outlaw.
“Mercy, for God’s sake bring some reason into this thing,” he said with anguish. “These people are starving.”
“I know, Jake.”
“They’re …” The half-breed’s voice choked, and for the first time in his life, Mercy saw one of the Pasquinel brothers unable to speak because of an anguish he did not try to hide. “Mercy, I promise you,” Jake said, “if this doesn’t stop,” and here he flicked the clipping with the back of his fingers, “this whole territory is going to explode.”
“You used to want that,” Mercy said compassionately.
“I’m older now,” his brother-in-law said. “It will be our women and children who will be slaughtered.”
Mike Pasquinel entered the tipi, a nondescript sort of man. He listened for a while, then said, “Max, we’re all going to perish—you and Lucinda and Zendt—all of us, if this is not stopped.” And suddenly Mercy saw his brother-in-law as a man of perception, a kind of God’s fool who had watched and laughed all his life and in the end had seen visions of reality. His round, placid face betrayed none of the emotion that marked Jake’s, but he spoke with a sorrow that was more compelling than his brother’s rage.
“Max,” he pleaded again, “you’re leaving us no escape but to die in battle, and we shall die, every man here.” With his pudgy right arm he swept the tipi, and one after the other of Broken Thumb’s men uttered the solemn declaration: “We shall die.”
Deeply shaken, Mercy left the renegade camp for his long trip back to Denver, and for the first part of his journey he was accompanied by his brothers. They spoke of old days, of how happy Lucinda was at the stockade, of Clay Basket and her remarkable life, and of the irony they felt when gold was discovered at the place their father had prospected so fruitlessly.
“Do you wish he’d found the gold … for you?” Mercy asked.
“No,” Jake said. “Indians don’t need gold. They need space … and buffalo.”
As Jake left he said, “It will be war,” and he turned on his horse and rode eastward.
Mike lingered, trying to say many things, but they were too confused and terrible to be voiced, so in the end he reached across his horse and embraced Mercy, “You are my brother,” he said in Arapaho, and he was gone.
When Mercy reported to General Asher at army headquarters, two grimy rooms at the rear of a hotel, he found himself in real trouble. The general seemed preoccupied as he gathered papers together, but he took time to say, “Mercy, Colonel Skimmerhorn has preferred serious charges against you.”
“That house arrest,” Mercy said scornfully. “You know it was improper.”
“Listen to the charges. ‘Consorting with the enemy in time of war, disobeying a direct order of a superior officer, fleeing to the enemy with national secrets.’ ”
Mercy brushed aside the inflated accusations: “General Asher, a catastrophe hangs over our heads, yours and mine. I know what I’m talking about. I’ve been with both branches of the Indians, the friendlies in camp where they ought to be and the hostiles out hiding.”
“You shouldn’t have been there,” Asher said firmly. “Colonel Skimmerhorn ordered you specifically …”
“General!” Mercy shouted. “We are one day away from total insurrection. To hell with Skimmerhorn. How dare he tell you, a general in the United States …”
“Max,” the tired Vermonter said, “look.” He held out a dispatch from Fort Leavenworth:
General Laban Asher
Commanding Officer, Denver
Proceed immediately and by swiftest transport to this headquarters prepared to report fully on steps taken to protect Platte River valley from marauding Indians.
S. J. Comly, Adjutant
Fort Leavenworth
29 October, 1864
It was a shocking message. After having received scores of appeals from Asher for additional troops to control the Platte, Leavenworth was finally responding—not by sending the needed help but by withdrawing the only man who might bring order to the territory.
General Asher accepted this asinine decision with equanimity. If that’s how headquarters wanted to run the Indian war, that’s how it would be. Recovering the dispatch and tapping it with sour amusement, he said, “I’m riding out with six soldiers … tonight.”
“Tonight!” Mercy exploded. “Who’ll be in command?”
“Colonel Skimmerhorn.”
“General, he’ll destroy everything.”
“And I’m putting you under house arrest, Mercy. You may not leave Denver till I return.”
Mercy was stunned. He could not ignore house arrest imposed by a general of the regular army, yet he saw disastrous consequences if Skimmerhorn were allowed to run wild. “General Asher,” he said quietly, “if you turn your troops over to Skimmerhorn, some frightful thing will happen that will damn your reputation forever. The good work you did at Vicksburg with the Vermonters …”
“You’re under house arrest,” Asher said curtly, and that night, on horseback, accompanied by his guard, he scuttled to the east.
Things could not have worked out better for Colonel Skimmerhorn. He had anticipated that Major Mercy would slip off to warn the Indians, and now he was rid of him, permanently. He had also expected to be placed in command of all troops in the area, and this, too, had happened. But he could not have foreseen General Asher’s vacillation, siding one day with him, the next with Mercy, depending on who saw him last. That Asher was now recalled from the area and sent to a distant post could only be a sign that God approved his plan.
He, Skimmerhorn, now had the command, and he proposed exercising it.
On a cold November morning he assembled his troops, sixty-three regular army men under Lieutenant Abel Tanner, whom he gave a field promotion to captain, and eleven hundred and sixteen militiamen under the tactical command of civilian volunteers. Astride his horse, he addressed his troops in few words:
“Men of valor! This day we march against the infidel. We are engaged in a noble undertaking. God smiles down upon us as we march forth to rid this territory forever of the Indian menace. Forward.”
Those in the city who realized what was afoot gathered at the edge of town to cheer the heroes as they marched past, and no eleventh-century band of Crusaders setting forth to battle the Saracen could have been more enthusiastically acclaimed. After Skimmerhorn acknowledged the shouts of his well-wishers he sent small detachments ahead to arrest and hold incommunicado all farmers in areas they would be marching through.
They camped that night at Zendt’s Farm. Next day, during a heavy snowstorm, Colonel Skimmerhorn performed a military miracle, one that would have done justice to a West Point graduate: he moved his entire body of troops, with five cannon, a score of supply wagons and forty ammunition mules across open land to Rattlesnake Buttes and maneuvered them into position at nightfall without being detected.
It may have been that the Indians were so lacking in food that their men were not strong enough to stand guard that night, but at any rate, Skimmerhorn, under cover of darkness, brought his cannon onto the ridge between the two buttes and directed his gunners how to aim them so as to blanket the sleeping area below. The men loaded their Starr carbines so there would be no delays during the attack and spent their time imagining the booty they could grab when the attack started.
With sound generalship Skimmerhorn divided his command into three segments. The center, under his leadership, would wait till three rounds of cannonfire had struck the tipis and would then move forth in a saber charge, cutting down those Indians who milled about in the confusion. The right flank, under Captain Tanner, whom he could trust, since he had fought Indians before, would circle to the east and come roaring in with a maximum charge to shoot down anyone who tried to escape in that direction. The left flank posed something of a problem, because there Captain Reed, a regular army officer, had to be given command, but Skimmerhorn was not sure he could be trusted.
“Captain Reed,” he said in hushed tones, “I want to remind you that your job will be to cover the left flank. I don’t want a single Indian slipping through your lines.”
“I understand, sir. Will they be heavily armed?”
“Armed? They’re Indians. Shoot ’em down.”
“What I meant was, will they be mounting an attack in my direction?”
“Captain Reed! When the cannons fire, there will be great confusion. From the center I expect to compound it. Inevitably in this confusion many of the Indians will rush your way. It’s your job to gun them down—all of them. Is that understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
At four in the morning Colonel Skimmerhorn summoned his officers to the ridge where the cannon waited. In solemn tones he told them, “Gentlemen, we are engaged in a great venture. Much is at stake. If we can win this victory, our glorious nation will be safe for generations yet to be born. Gentlemen, God rides with you. Courage.”
In the motley camp below them at that hour were 1483 Arapaho and Cheyenne, distributed as follows: chiefs 14, other braves of fighting age 389, mature women past the age of sixteen 427, children 653. They were supposed to have no guns, but they did have a few. They also had some four hundred bows, many not strung because deer sinews were growing scarce, and nearly two thousand arrows, a good many of which were not instantly accessible.
The camp mounted no guards that night, for none were needed. The Indians had moved into this cul-de-sac at the express command of the United States government, and here they were supposed to be fed and protected. At last they were at peace.
At half past four a young brave left his tipi to urinate, and according to custom he looked in four directions, seeing nothing. At five Chief Black Knee turned on his tattered buffalo robe, thought he heard a noise toward the buttes, but went back to sleep.
At five minutes after six, just as light was beginning to appear in the east, there was a shattering explosion from the ridge between the buttes, and five cannonballs ricocheted through the camp, killing four sleeping Indians and maiming seven.
The Indian who reacted to this surprise assault with greatest self-control was Lost Eagle. He was certain that some terrible mistake had been made—some mix-up of commands—and it was his responsibility to straighten things out. No American soldier would fire a cannon into an undefended …
Crash! A second salvo tore through the camp. With trembling hands Lost Eagle rummaged through his parfleche until he found his blue officer’s uniform. Putting it on hastily, he hung about his neck his bronze Buchanan. From the honored spot above his bed he took down the American flag which President Lincoln had given him. He put on his high-crowned hat and left his tipi just as the third round of cannonballs ripped through the camp.
About him he saw men and women staggering from wounds and one girl with the right side of her body blown away. The tipis of two chiefs he relied upon were completely pulverized and the men were dead along with their women.
With great resolution he moved among his people, counseling them: “Wait! I will find out what’s happening.” Young men ran up to advise him that many troops were hiding behind the ridge, and in a way this news comforted him, for among them would be Major Mercy, who would know how to correct this awful mistake.
At this moment the central body of troops, under Colonel Skimmerhorn, swept down the slope leading from the buttes and charged headlong into the mass of tipis. Sabers flashed. Pistols fired. One man with a revolver fired six times at six different women, killing four of them. Horses ran over children, and soldiers with burning brands began to fire the tipis.
Amid all the confusion and the screams of terror, Lost Eagle stood before his tipi, waving the American flag and shouting in English, “Stop! This is a mistake!”
As he was standing thus, Colonel Skimmerhorn spotted him and judged that here was the focus of the rebellion. Spurring his horse, he galloped down upon the old man, swiping at him with his saber, but the blade caught in the flag and ripped it, missing the enemy.
The colonel swung his horse in a wide arc and rushed again at the old chief, who kept shouting, “Colonel, wait!” The colonel was by no means an adept swordsman and this time he struck Lost Eagle’s tall hat, so he whipped out his revolver and would have ridden to within six inches of the blue uniform, so anxious was he not to miss, except that a cry rose on the right flank and an orderly shouted, “Colonel! Here comes Tanner!”
Down from the eastern bank roared Abel Tanner, followed by his tested Indian fighters. They swept through the camp, killing and slashing and burning. Young girls, babies in arms, old women too feeble to run, braves trying to defend themselves—Tanner’s men sabered them all.
Colonel Skimmerhorn, surveying the success so far, was smugly certain that this was going to be one of the memorable victories of the west, but from the corner of his eye he saw with horror that one part of his grand design was not functioning. “Where is Captain Reed?” he roared, and his orderlies took up the cry: “Where is Captain Reed?”
Skimmerhorn rushed up to Captain Tanner as the latter was setting fire to the last remaining tipis and bellowed, “Where is that bastard Reed?”
Where, indeed? Captain Vincent Reed had been born in the city of Richmond, Virginia, of northern parents who were stationed there by the telegraph company. He had attended West Point and he thought he knew something about warfare, having served under General Pope in his long and futile struggle against General Stonewall Jackson. Those men were fighters who would face the enemy till the last bullet was fired, but neither would participate in such a slaughter.
Reed had had his troops in position. He was quite prepared to rush in for the kill, and he had positioned himself so that he would be in the vanguard when his men made their charge against the guns of the young braves threatening the left flank. But when he saw that the enemy had no weapons, that even their bows and arrows were not at hand, and that he was supposed to chop down little girls and old women, he rebelled on the spot, taking counsel with no one but his own conscience.
“It’s the signal to charge,” an orderly shouted.
“Stand!”
“Captain, that was the third salvo. Colonel Skimmerhorn has already moved in.”
“Stand.”
He held his horse reined tight, tears of rage in his eyes. He knew that he was doing an unforgivable thing—he was disobeying an understood command in the face of the enemy—but he could not permit his men to participate in this dreadful massacre, not so long as they were his men.
“Goddamnit, Captain,” a sergeant shouted, “look at ’em! They’re escapin’.”
“Let them go, Sergeant,” he said.
“Look at ’em!” the sergeant screamed. “They’re the ones we’re supposed to get.”
“Look at them,” Captain Reed said. “Do look at them, Sergeant.”
And they looked, and there were men who sat their horses at that moment who would all the rest of their lives give thanks that on this day they were under the command of Captain Reed and not Captain Tanner, for the Indians who slipped past them to safety in the hills were old, they were young, they were crippled, they were young men with their arms shot off by cannonballs—and among them all, there was not one gun, not one arrow. They escaped, the most pitiful remnant of an enemy ever faced by a contingent of the United States Army.
It is not pleasant to recite what Tanner’s men did that day, but it is necessary. The fighting continued for some time, since those few braves who did have weapons resisted with valor. It was not unusual for one Indian to charge a whole company, determined to kill as many whites as he could before he fell riddled with pistol shots. In its later moments, however, the battle consisted mainly of Skimmerhorn’s militiamen roaring across the prairie in pursuit of some solitary Indian who had slipped through the lines. These were run down and lanced with sabers and then scalped.
Three hundred and eighty-seven Indians were slain: 7 chiefs, 108 braves, 123 women and 149 children; all but sixteen were scalped, even the children, for the men sought trophies to prove their victory. All gloried in the order, “Take no prisoners.” A militiaman named Gropper rummaged through piles of dead, performing atrocious mutilation on the corpses, shouting as he did so, “That’ll teach ’em to kill white women.” Other militiamen, officers and men alike, unsheathed their knives and hacked away at corpses until regular soldiers made them stop.
Old men and women who tried to escape the flaming tipis were thrust back in, and four who volunteered to surrender were stabbed through the neck. The old wife of Chief Lost Eagle was shot eleven times, and survived; she lay quiet among a heap of dead, not even whimpering when one of Tanner’s men scalped her. She was blinded by the blood streaming across her face, but she lay there simulating a corpse, and in the night she made her way to the north, bleeding not only from the scalping but from her many wounds.
Lost Eagle, thinking his wife dead, continued waving his tattered flag. Bullets sped past him, and men with lances, and to all he shouted with diminishing vigor, “Wait! Wait! This is a mistake!” In the melee he wandered to the sector commanded by Captain Reed, and when the troops there saw the American uniform and the pitiful figure wearing it—an old man in a funny hat, with deep wrinkles down his face and glazed eyes that could not comprehend—they let him go.
Captain Tanner’s men perpetrated their worst offenses against the Indian children. Many, of course, had been left without elders in the first few minutes of fighting, and as they ran wildly about, soldiers speared them. Others survived briefly, but were shot as they tried to crawl away. Some did escape to the prairie, but they were soon run down by horses and scalped before they stopped breathing. Their bodies would lie unattended to be devoured by dogs and jackals.
Two of the children, a girl and a boy, by some miracle escaped death. They would be taken alive back to Denver and exhibited in vaudeville theaters, along with the scalps of their parents. Two other children were caught by Tanner’s men, and they, too, might have survived, except that as the soldiers held them, Colonel Skimmerhorn rode up and asked, “What are you doing with those children?” and the men said they’d captured them, and when Skimmerhorn snapped, “Nits grow into lice,” the men killed them.
On his victorious return from battle, Colonel Skimmerhorn halted his expedition at Zendt’s Farm long enough to compose the communiqué which subsequently flashed across America, making him a considerable hero at a time when other campaigns were going badly for the Union:
Rattlesnake Buttes, Colorado Territory, November 30, 1864
Yesterday at 6:05 in the morning in heavy snow, troops under my command launched a gallant assault against a heavy concentration of Indian warriors who were massing for a general war against the white man. Taking the Indian army by surprise, elements of my force swept in from three sides and achieved a major victory over the savages. Our side killed nearly four hundred Indian warriors while suffering a loss of only seven men. All hands behaved with gallantry except for one deplorable performance which will be dealt with in a special report. Exceptional courage was displayed by Captain Abel Tanner, who engaged the savages under heavy fire and he is hereby commended.
Acts of heroism were too numerous to mention, but recommendations will be forthcoming at the proper time. As a result of this outstanding victory over a savage enemy, peace is assured in this Territory. The attack was doubly justified by our discovery of nineteen scalps of white men in possession of the savages.
Frank Skimmerhorn
Colonel Commanding
Colorado Militia
In his communiqué the Hero of Rattlesnake Buttes conveniently overlooked the fact that the real Indian enemies—Chief Broken Thumb, the Pasquinel brothers and their renegades—were still at large. Skimmerhorn had killed the women; the warriors would be heard from later, in terrible fashion.
News of his victory reached Denver the day after the massacre, and when he marched victoriously into the city he found throngs waiting to cheer the man who had saved Colorado from the red devils.
In the brief years since the gold rush, Denver had become an attractive town of 3500, with doctors and real estate agents vying for office space with meat markets and bakeries, and citizens were relieved to know that they were safe from further Indian threats. The ladies of Denver, in silk and brocade, entertained Skimmerhorn in their homes, while three stores on Blake Street gained favorable publicity by extending him credit, which he used freely.
Meetings were held and he was awarded medals from grateful citizens. St. John’s convened a special thanksgiving service at which prayers were offered and at which the colonel spoke with becoming modesty. He told of how difficult the battle had been and of the extraordinary courage displayed by Captain Tanner and his men on the right flank.
As to the left flank, ugly rumors had begun to circulate through Denver that Captain Reed had behaved with less than heroism, and some even said he had been an outright coward. Captain Tanner told one newspaperman, “Far be it from me to question the courage of a fellow officer, but when the bullets started whizzing, he had skedaddled.”
The rumors magnified, and some of Reed’s own men began saying that he had been terrified at the sound of the cannon and had tears in his eyes. The issue was joined when Colonel Skimmerhorn filed official court-martial charges against his aide: “Refusing to obey a lawful command, cowardice in the face of the enemy, conduct unbecoming an officer.” When General Asher returned from Fort Leavenworth to find himself something of a hero for having appointed Colonel Skimmerhorn to a command position from which he could settle the Indian question “permanently,” he thought first that he would convene a full-scale public court-martial. This would be popular with the territory, which was idolizing Skimmerhorn, but later he decided that with the Union racked by war it would be better to allow Captain Reed to resign silently and bear his disgrace as best he could, and that was his order.
“What should I do?” Reed asked Major Mercy and his wife.
“Fight to the last inch,” Lisette counseled.
“We know Skimmerhorn’s a madman,” Mercy said, “but he’s a clever opponent and the people are in back of him.”
“Fight!” Lisette pleaded. When Reed hesitated, she said, “If you allow them to throw you out of the army now, Vincent, you’ll be branded as a traitor. You’re finished.”
It was she who planned the tactic whereby the nation first began to question what had really happened at Rattlesnake Buttes. She was tackling a formidable adversary, for in the months of December and January, Colonel Skimmerhorn moved through Colorado like a triumphant Roman consul, giving lectures on how to treat the Indian and conducting church services during which he would utter long prayers about how it was God who chastised those who, having once known His beneficence turned their faces against Him. In these talks he dealt generously with Captain Reed, explaining him as a young man who had served his country well as a paper-work officer under General Pope but who had cringed at the sound of real cannon, and it was that little condescension which was his undoing, for Lisette Mercy had met General Pope at one of her mother’s dinners in St. Louis, and she wrote to him and told him that his aide was being unjustly accused of cowardice—and slowly the Washington wheels began to grind.
The major blow, however, was delivered by her own husband. In February he met a newspaper editor and told him that grave doubts had arisen about the affair at Rattlesnake Buttes—that Chief Lost Eagle had tried to surrender, that no arms of any kind had been found in the camp, and that men under Captain Tanner’s command had performed atrocities.
The resulting story tore Colorado apart. Two members of Skimmerhorn’s militia horsewhipped the editor of the paper, and leaders throughout the territory rallied to Skimmerhorn’s defense. He became more popular than ever and won national acclaim by volunteering to raise a militia which would clean out the Indians in Utah.
But nagging little things kept cropping up, and in March 1865 General Harvey Wade, a slight man who tolerated no nonsense, appeared in Denver with five assistants to assess the grave charges that were being made against the conduct of American troops. The city, having taken Colonel Skimmerhorn to its heart, was very cool toward the diminutive stranger whose investigation might diminish their hero. He treated them the same way.
“This is an impartial inquiry into the general events that occurred at Rattlesnake Buttes last November,” he announced when the panel convened, “and in particular, into the conduct under fire of Captain Vincent Reed, against whom the gravest charges have been lodged.” At the Denver Hotel, under his skillful questioning, he began to penetrate the miasma engulfing this sorry affair. Within two days he satisfied himself and the board that General Laban Asher had been incompetent and morally supine. The Vermonter left the hearing room a man destroyed, and as he went, he paused to look at Major Mercy, who had predicted such a consequence.
General Wade then proceeded to interrogate the Zendts. “You’re half-Indian?” he asked Lucinda, and when she acknowledged this, he directed the court to take that into account when weighing her testimony. The Zendts told of how Colonel Skimmerhorn had placed their stockade under arrest to prevent them from warning the Indians …
“Hearsay, you are guessing at his motives,” General Wade snapped.
Zendt showed the saber cut Skimmerhorn had inflicted on him, and Wade asked brusquely, “You admit you made a move toward him, don’t you?” and when Levi nodded, Wade snapped, “I’d cut you, too.” But when Levi repeated the insult Skimmerhorn had thrown at him, Wade made no comment.
He summoned Maxwell Mercy and listened intently as the major outlined step by step the insanities of Colonel Skimmerhorn, but in the end he asked three damaging questions: “Are you half brother to the Pasquinels? Did you seek them out prior to the battle? Did you break house arrest to do so?” Mercy’s truthful answers to these questions damaged his credibility with the board, and he knew it.
Then Wade tackled the matter of the battle itself, and here Captain Tanner proved a bulwark of support. He said he had served under many commanders, but none finer than Colonel Skimmerhorn. He detailed the battle plans and the colonel’s heroic behavior. He indicated sixteen of his men who would verify his testimony, and one after another paraded to the witness stand to tell of Skimmerhorn’s bravery under fire.
Next the city of Denver provided a score of witnesses to testify that if there had been confusion in the command, it lay with General Asher and never with Colonel Skimmerhorn, after which two clergymen volunteered the information that Skimmerhorn was a religious man who had preached in their churches, a man of the most stalwart integrity.
The whole city was backing Skimmerhorn, and farmers from along the Platte were moving into town to give him support if he required it. Members of the militia, who considered themselves on trial as much as their colonel, rallied round, and there was a general feeling that the city might blow up if General Wade and his commission dared condemn Skimmerhorn.
Zendt wanted to know why they couldn’t ask General Wade to put Captain Reed on the stand to tell the real truth, but Mercy pointed out that Wade would never allow Reed to testify against the colonel, because Reed himself was on trial as a coward, the gravest charge that could be brought against an officer. Only Lisette Mercy remained convinced that some way would be found to break down this preposterous façade.
She was in a store buying some cloth when she heard a young girl who clerked there saying to a friend, “If they want the truth, they should ask Jimmy. He says it was horrible.”
With considerable self-control Lisette refrained from asking any questions that would betray her interest. She ran home to tell her husband what she had heard. “We must find out who Jimmy is,” Mercy said, and Lucinda went back to the store and engaged the girl in conversation. She discovered that Jimmy was the girl’s brother, a young member of the militia, and that when telling his sister of what he had seen, he had vomited.
They found Jimmy Clark at one of the barracks, and five minutes’ conversation satisfied them that here was a young man of conscience who was revolted almost to the point of losing his sanity by what he had seen at Rattlesnake Buttes, and they got word of his existence to General Wade.
Jimmy Clark’s testimony shocked both the court and the nation. Quietly and with considerable patience General Wade led the nervous young man along, step by painful step, halting the interrogation whenever Jimmy wiped his eyes or tried to control his breath.
“You saw men of your command use their sabers on girl children who were running away?”
“Yessir, cut right through them.”
“You saw men whose names you know discharge their revolvers in the faces of little boys?”
“Yessir, four times.”
“The other time was when these men were holding two children, and Colonel Skimmerhorn rode up and said, ‘Nits grow into lice,’ and the men shot that pair too.”
“Now, this next question is most important, Private Clark, and before you answer, I want you to remember that you are under oath.”
“Yessir.”
“Did you see men of your command moving among the dead with knives in their hands?”
“I did.”
“What were they doing?”
“Cutting off the breasts of women.”
General Wade took a deep breath and asked solemnly, “You yourself saw soldiers cutting off the breasts of dead women?”
“One of them wasn’t dead, sir.”
Here Clark started to gag, but all he could do was heave, and General Wade directed a corporal to give him a drink of water.
“Did you, with your own eyes, see men of your unit scalp dead Indians?”
“Yessir, they brought the scalps to Denver and held an exhibition, along with the two children.” Seeing that General Wade was puzzled by this revelation, he explained, “In the theater.”
“Theater!” Wade roared. “Sergeant Kennedy, were Indian prisoners exhibited in a public theater?”
“Yessir,” an orderly announced. “At the Apollo Theater. Admission fifteen cents.”
“Oh, my God,” the general exploded, and for that day the hearings were halted.
Next morning when Jimmy Clark appeared to resume his testimony he was not easily recognizable. It was obvious that he had been beaten brutally. His lips were cut and his eyes blackened. One arm hung limp at his side. When he took the stand, General Wade asked, “Private Clark, do you wish to tell this court of inquiry what happened to you since we last saw you?”
“I stumbled, sir.”
“You stumbled?”
“Yessir.”
“Is that all you wish to tell us?”
“Yessir.”
“Stenographer, let the record show that this morning Private Clark appeared with his lips cut, his eyes blackened—both of them—with a heavy welt across his chin and with one arm hanging limp. He stumbled.”
There was a spell of quietness in the courtroom, with only the sound of the scratching pen, and then General Wade spoke. “Only a few questions today. Did you, during the fight, have an opportunity to see the Indian chief known as Lost Eagle.”
“I did, sir.”
“Tell us under what circumstances.”
“It was late in the battle, sir, and this old man came headin’ toward me, and at first I thought he was one of us because he had on an army uniform, but it was old style, and then I saw he was an Indian. He was carryin’ half a flag and around his neck he had a brass medal, about this big.”
“How could you tell it was a medal?”
“Because when he saw me he supposed I was going to shoot him, and he held out his hands like this, with the torn flag in one hand, and he said, ‘It’s a mistake.’ ”
“Did you also see a Cheyenne chief called White Antelope?”
“I did, sir.”
“Tell the court under what circumstances.”
“Me and Ben Willard—he’s a half-breed guide—when we went into the center of the tipis we saw this old man, maybe seventy. You wouldn’t believe it. He just stood there with his arms folded while the soldiers shot at him, and he was singin’.”
“Singing?”
“Yessir, in a strong voice. I asked Ben Willard what he was singin’, and Ben listened and told me, ‘His death chant,’ and the old man chanted, ‘Only the earth and the mountains, nothin’ lives except the earth and the mountains.’ Then three soldiers came at him at once and gunned him down and one ripped off his pants and cut off his balls, and Ben Willard shouted, ‘What in hell are you doin’?’ and the man said, ‘Tobacco pouch.’ ”
This testimony produced another silence, after which General Wade coughed, as if he were about to launch into a crucial part of the testimony. “I understand that you overheard Captain Reed giving orders that day.”
“Yessir, three times. I was servin’ with Captain Tanner, and when Reed didn’t charge, he grew furious. ‘Run over there and tell him to get goin’,’ Captain Tanner told me, and when I reached Reed’s command post I told him, ‘You’re supposed to charge,’ but he said, ‘Those Indians have no guns, or anything else.’ ”
“Then what did he say?”
“ ‘Stand.’ ”
“Is that all?”
“Yessir, and we stood.”
“What happened the second time?”
“About halfway through the fight Captain Tanner saw that some Indian women were escapin’ through a pass in the rocks, and he grabbed me and shouted, ‘Tell that damned coward Reed he’s supposed to stop them,’ and I ran across the battlefield and told Reed, ‘Captain Tanner says you’re supposed to stop them.’ And Reed told me, ‘Let them go through.’ ”
“Did you do so?”
“Yessir. And I did not want to serve with Captain Tanner any more, so I stayed with Reed, and at the end of the battle, when we saw what the other soldiers were doin’ to the dead bodies, he asked me, ‘What’s the matter, Clark?’ and I told him, ‘I’m sick,’ and he said, ‘We should all be sick this day.’ ”
General Wade coughed again and said in a low voice, “Now, Private Clark, this court would like to hear specifically why you were sick.”
The young militiaman looked helplessly at the bank of officers and mumbled, “Well, like I said …”
“No, you haven’t said.”
Clark appealed to the general. “I don’t know the words, sir. The proper words, that is.”
Wade left his judge’s seat and whispered with Clark for a few minutes, then returned to his chair. To the other members of the court he explained, “I was telling him the words we use.” To Clark he said, “Now tell us why you were sick.”
“Well, sir, there was this man with a very sharp knife, and he looked around until he found a dead Indian woman, and with his knife he cut away her private parts.”
There was a deathly hush in the room, then General Wade’s quiet voice asking, “And what did he do with them?”
“Jammed them down over his saddle horn, sir.”
“How often did he do this?”
“He went to six different women.”
“And you saw this with your own eyes?”
Such testimony seemed so improbable that the members of the court were stunned. Finally a young colonel asked, “Private Clark, do you appreciate the significance of the oath you took at the beginning of your testimony?”
“I do. I’m a religious man.”
“General Wade, can I have this man sworn again?”
“He’s been sworn once.”
“I’d feel easier, under the circumstances.”
So Jimmy Clark was sworn again, and the young colonel asked, “Did you, yourself, in person, see Colonel Skimmerhorn ride up to soldiers who were holding an Indian girl and an Indian boy and command them to kill them?”
“No, sir. He gave no command.”
“In your previous testimony you said he did.”
“No, sir, if you’ll excuse me, sir. What I said was that he rode up to the men and said, ‘Nits grow into lice,’ and it was after that the men killed them.”
Jimmy Clark’s testimony created a sensation in Denver, but it was unsubstantiated, so General Wade summoned every man who had stood behind Captain Reed that day. The first thirty militiamen refused to testify, or testified in noncommittal ways, but then Wade got to a handful of regular army men, and with revulsion they not only verified what Clark had said but added hideous details of their own, and one man broke into tears, after which General Wade asked in a fatherly way, “Son, why didn’t you step forward like Private Clark and testify to these facts? Why did you make me drag you in here like a criminal and force the truth out of you?”
The man looked dumbly at the general, shrugged his shoulders in a confusion that was obviously painful and said in a whisper, “I thought it was all an awful mistake.”
The inquiry ended, and Captain Reed was sent back east to a cleaner war, carrying with him a letter of commendation for having behaved in accordance with the highest standards of his profession.
General Wade and the court did not have the power to punish Skimmerhorn, who was not responsible to the United States Army, but they could issue a bitter rebuke to the self-appointed hero:
Rarely in military history has there been a battle communiqué more mendacious and self-aggrandizing than the one issued by Colonel Skimmerhorn at Zendt’s Farm on the day after his attack upon an undefended Indian village whose occupants were unarmed and eager to surrender. Each phrase in that communiqué merits individual analysis, but four will suffice to show the quality of the whole. “A heavy concentration of Indian warriors” turns out to be 403 men of fighting age and 1,080 women and children. “Engaged savages under heavy fire” means that Colonel Skimmerhorn’s men were free to hack at will, since the enemy had few guns. The “exceptional courage of Captain Abel Tanner” means that he allowed men under his command to commit the most heinous atrocities which this court has ever heard of. “Peace is assured in this Territory” means that the prairies are now aflame and war is everywhere, brought on by this man’s intemperate action. Special comment must be made about the last sentence of the communiqué, for it is both perfidious and imprecise. The nineteen white scalps used to justify the attack turn out to have been one scalp, very old and possibly not from a white man, and it is unclear whether the savages referred to were the Indians or Colonel Skimmerhorn’s own men.
The report, when it reached the streets, evoked a blind fury, and Sergeant Kennedy had to warn General Wade that it would not be prudent for him to appear in public, for there was talk of hanging him, but the little soldier pushed his advisor aside and walked boldly to where his horses waited for the ride back to Leavenworth, reminding Kennedy in a loud voice that the men who might want to hang him were more accustomed to dealing with women and children than with a soldier who stood ready to put a bullet through them if they made a move.
Nevertheless, on the day following Wade’s departure, one of Skimmerhorn’s supporters ambushed young Jimmy Clark and shot him dead in full daylight at a main intersection.
Some sixty persons witnessed the murder, and saw clearly who had done it—a broken-down prospector who had been paid fifteen dollars for the job—but no one would testify against him. Under the circumstances, the murderer had to be released. He was slipped another fifteen dollars and was seen no more.
This doleful event received scant notice because a hurricane had begun to sweep the prairies. After the massacre at Rattlesnake Buttes, Chief Broken Thumb, who escaped death by refusing to enter the reservation, assumed command of the two tribes, with Jake Pasquinel as his first lieutenant, and the spirit of revenge that animated these men made disaster inevitable.
Major Mercy was dispatched from Denver to offer the tribes any reasonable concessions if only they would lay down their arms and accept a permanent peace guaranteed by Washington, and on a wintry day in a tipi north of the Platte he met with the three crucial leaders for the last time. As at their first meeting, Jake Pasquinel sat in the middle, his face old and scarred and without even a flicker of hope. To his left sat Broken Thumb, lost in a bitter hatred. To Pasquinel’s right sat Lost Eagle, smaller now but still wearing his funny hat. How pitiful these men seemed, confused remnants of tribes that had once defined and protected an empire, how lost in time, how utterly beyond rescue.
“You’re brave to come here,” Jake conceded bitterly.
“I come with a final offer … real peace.”
Broken Thumb and Jake laughed in his face, and the former snarled, “Get out.”
“I am ashamed,” Mercy began.
“Ashamed?” Pasquinel exploded. “Hundreds dead—old men and old women, children too—and you’re ashamed. Mercy, go before we kill you.”
“Get out!” Broken Thumb repeated.
“Lost Eagle,” Mercy said softly, “cannot we …”
“He is not to speak,” Pasquinel shouted. “He betrayed us. Everything he said was lies.”
Mercy pushed Jake away and went to the old chief, but no words were spoken, for Lost Eagle had only tears—the time for words was lost.
“Can’t we talk reason?” Mercy pleaded, but Broken Thumb refused him the dignity of an answer.
It was Jake who spoke for the Indians now. “It will be war … and murder … and burning … all along the Platte.”
“Oh, God!” Mercy cried, close to tears. “It mustn’t end this way.”
“Get out,” Broken Thumb said, and he called for braves to take the major away, but Mercy broke loose and came back to Jake and took him by the hands and said, “It should have ended differently,” and Jake stared at him impassively and said, “From the beginning it was bound to end this way,” and the braves dragged Mercy away.
The two tribes went on a rampage, looting and burning and belatedly earning for themselves the designation savages. With either Broken Thumb or Jake in the lead, they would sweep down on unprotected farms and slaughter everything that lived, even the chickens.
They destroyed the little settlement at Julesburg and overran the army fort farther west along the river. The South Platte became a region of terror, with fiery assaults day after day. The telegraph wires were cut, so that no news seeped in to Denver, and the overland stage stopped running, for on two different attempts it had been waylaid and its passengers killed.
A Denver photographer remembered a portrait he had taken of the Pasquinel brothers, and posters were distributed throughout the west, showing two scowling half-breeds in Indian dress—Jake with a livid scar down his face, Mike with an evil grin—and from the Atlantic to the Pacific, readers waited avidly for the latest news about the depredations of the “Half-Breed Monsters of the Plains.”
Finally the killing became so rampant that an army detachment was sent out from Omaha to track down the hostiles. The tribes divided into two groups. One, led by Lost Eagle, surrendered to the army at Fort Kearny; the other, led by Broken Thumb and the Pasquinels, sent a message to Omaha that they would fight to the death.
In a pitched battle, the soldiers closed in on Broken Thumb, and although he could have escaped along the Platte, he chose to stake himself out on ground he had long defended. With seven stubborn warriors he fought till bullets swept the area, then stood upright, and with arms uplifted, began his chant: “Only the mountains live forever, only the river runs for all the days.” He grabbed what rifles he could from the corpses about him and fired methodically until nine bullets ripped through his chest.
The Pasquinel brothers escaped this battle, and a cry rose from the whole nation set free from its preoccupation with the Civil War: “The monsters must be slain.” And now a bizarre situation developed. Colonel Skimmerhorn volunteered to conscript a militia of his former adherents. “We shall track down the miscreants if their path leads to hell itself!” he proclaimed, and men from all parts of the territory proved eager to march with him again. All Denver applauded when he announced, “Our punitive expedition sets out from Zendt’s Farm tomorrow!”
His opening strategy was draconian. Distributing teams along a three-hundred-mile stretch of the Platte, he waited for dry and windy days, then set fire to the prairie, producing a conflagration so extensive that it burned away all edible fodder from the Platte nearly to the Arkansas. A pall of smoke hung over the area and wildlife for thousands of square miles was threatened. It was one of the worst disasters ever to hit the west, and it accomplished nothing.
Conquered Indians were already on the reservation. The Pasquinel brothers and their renegades knew how to slip through the flames, so even while Skimmerhorn was setting fire to the prairies, they rampaged up and down the Platte, burning farms and scalping the inhabitants.
But finally Skimmerhorn tightened the noose, leaving the Pasquinels diminishing territory in which to maneuver, and one wintry morning along the Platte, about twenty miles east of Zendt’s Farm, a detachment of militia surprised Jake and pinioned his arms before he could shoot himself. Messengers were sent to the colonel with the stirring news: “Jake Pasquinel has been taken.”
Skimmerhorn reached the scene about two o’clock in the afternoon, and within ten minutes, convened a drumhead court-martial. “Guilty,” the men said unanimously, and no juster verdict was ever reached along the Platte. Two men threw a rope over a cottonwood branch, tied it around Jake Pasquinel’s neck and dragged him aloft. The knot had been poorly tied, and for an unbelievably long time he kicked and twisted, strangling slowly as the militia cheered.
That night word of the hanging reached Zendt’s Farm, and Levi got a shovel, saddled up a horse, kissed Lucinda goodbye and rode east to cut down the body and bury it. When word of this circulated through the region, it infuriated the Skimmerhorn people, who judged it a rebuke to their triumph, and they were so enraged that a squaw man should have done this thing, they stormed down to the stockade and set it afire.
Stolidly Zendt watched as the flames consumed his home, then had the bitter experience of being turned away by four different neighbors before he found one who would give him and his wife shelter for that night.
Only Mike Pasquinel now survived, a fattish half-breed, fifty-four years old and aware that there was no longer hope of any kind. By keeping to the low bushes that grew along the Platte, he made his way to where his sister had lived, and when he saw the ashes of the stockade, he supposed that she and her family were dead. But he remained hidden, and finally saw Levi Zendt and Lucinda come poking among the ruins to see what could be salvaged.
Cautiously he made himself known to them, and with equal caution they spoke. “In this village you’re bound to be captured,” they reasoned, “so give yourself up.”
“No!” Mike snarled. “Find me two guns. I’ll fight it out.”
“Mike,” his sister pleaded, “let’s put a stop to the killing.”
For one brief moment Mike seemed to waver. “Will they hang me?” he asked.
Lucinda was afraid to hazard a guess, so she turned to Levi, who said quietly, “I think so.”
“No!” Lucinda protested. “They didn’t hang those three who surrendered in Nebraska.”
“They weren’t Pasquinels,” Mike said, and with that, old bitterness took control. “I’ll hole up behind that wall. I’ll shoot ten before they shoot me.”
It was Levi who made the decision: “We’ll give you no guns, Mike. You’re going to surrender, now. Decent men live around here, and they’ll see you get a decent trial.”
So they made three white flags from Lucinda’s petticoat and held them aloft on sticks and walked slowly down the village’s only street, with Levi and Lucinda shouting, “Surrender! Surrender! We’re bringing in Mike Pasquinel.”
As they passed the offices of the Clarion a shot rang out and Pasquinel crumpled to the ground. He had been shot in the back by Colonel Frank Skimmerhorn, who had watched each step of the surrender from the Clarion window. The editor, having been on the scene, wrote this eye-witness story:
Vindicated! Colonel Frank Skimmerhorn, who in recent months has suffered contumely at the hands of the lily-livered segment of our population, was completely vindicated yesterday afternoon when he single-handedly shot the last of the Pasquinels as the half-breed was brazenly trying to commit further depredations in this town. Colonel Skimmerhorn can now hang up his guns.
Now that the threat represented by the Pasquinel brothers and Broken Thumb was eliminated, officials sought a true peace. Belatedly they awakened to the fact that in Major Mercy they had someone who understood Indians and who might possibly bring order to the chaos of recent months. Accordingly, they sent him north to deal with Lost Eagle and those few who were camped once more at that fatal spot near the buttes.
When Mercy saw the old man—bent, rejected by his people but still ready to patch up some kind of peace with the white man—he had to control himself severely lest he show his tears, for Lost Eagle appeared with a fragment of the flag Abraham Lincoln had given him and the Buchanan dangling from his neck.
“Was Mr. Lincoln really shot?” the old man asked.
“He was,” Mercy said.
“I am sorry for all good men who are murdered,” Lost Eagle said. At this point his wife appeared, miraculously recovered from her wounds but scarred about the head from being scalped. Unlike her husband, she was in good spirits. “That day Man-Above watched me,” she said, and they both proceeded to outline new plans whereby the surviving Arapaho and Cheyenne would get food and blankets.
“We owe you much,” Mercy said, and in proof he ordered supply wagons to come in from Zendt’s Farm, and soldiers actually unloaded foodstuffs, and Lost Eagle told his council, “See! It really is a new day.”
Two days later, when Major Mercy returned to Denver, toughs from Colonel Skimmerhorn’s disbanded militia lay in wait and attacked him, calling him “Indian lover,” and they beat him so savagely that he lay in the street for several hours before he could summon up enough strength to crawl home.
Lisette heard him fumbling up the steps, and ran down to throw her arms about him and drag him into their house. She did not cry, nor did she panic. With delicate touch she cut away the torn skin and washed him. She helped him to their bed and made him broth, which he could not take through his badly damaged mouth, and after doing all she could with salves and ointments, she said defiantly, “Maxwell, we still did the right thing,” and with that assurance he fell asleep.
CAUTION TO US EDITORS: You are aware, since you sent her, that Carol Endermann spent the last weekend in Centennial advising me of your gratification that the work was going so well and of your disappointment that I was sending you too few scintillating quotes and summary generalizations. She cited three examples of the kind of thing you had hoped to get from me, passages which create the illusion of putting the reader at the heart of the problem:
The Indian succeeded in his occupancy of the great prairie because he was able to harmonize his limited inner psychological space, hemmed in by ignorance and superstition, with the unlimited outer physical space by which he was surrounded; whereas the white man failed in his attempt to subdue the prairie because he was unable to harmonize his unlimited inner psychological space, set free by the discoveries of science and the liberation of religion, with the limited outer physical space, which he had cut down to manageable size by the wheel, the wagon, the road, the train and the permanent fort.
If an undergraduate student in whom I had faith submitted that, I would write in the margin “High-falutin’, mebbe?” If a graduate student of promise did, I would write “Pretentious.” If an article in a learned journal, which I was called upon to review, contained it, I would write “Professor Bates offers us a sophisticated disjunction, each premise of which is false, and the conclusion empty.” And if a trusted colleague uttered it, I would tell him “Bullshit.”
The Indian was set free by his discovery of the horse, but because he had no basic philosophy to guide his use of this animal, he allowed it to carry him back into a servitude greater than the one he had known when his only machine was the dog-travois.
This is what we call iridescence without illumination. It was not misuse of the horse that dragged the Indian back to defeat; it was the arrival of the white man on a superior iron horse. But there I go, doing it myself, and it is just as fatuously iridescent when I do it as when another guy does.
The great mystery of Indian history is not his genesis, which becomes clearer every day, nor his supine submission to the white man, which constitutes his great shame, but the fact that he could not adjust while the black slave did. It is for this reason that we see today the former slave in a position of spiritual command, while the Indian has become the slave. The reason, I think, lies in point of origin. The Indian brought with him from Asia neither a culture nor a religion, whereas the black brought both from Africa—a poor culture and the wrong religion, but nevertheless some structure upon which he could build and a base from which he could relatively quickly learn to operate.
This is double-doming. It’s fun. Sometimes it generates a usable concept, and it is invaluable if you’re writing a daily syndicated column where you are obliged to appear smarter than your readers and the local editors. But it’s only a game; it rarely produces anything solid; and it is intellectually undignified. What’s worse, the example given is strict racism.
My strong aversion to this kind of writing stems from the period during which I served with the army in Korea. I was in charge of a billet used by newspaper, magazine and television correspondents, and each Friday the correspondent for a distinguished magazine would lug his typewriter into the bar and groan, “Well, it’s that time again, boys,” and he would type with bold beginning, “So at week’s end the free world could be sure of one thing …” And then we would sit around and try to discover what mind-boggling truth the free world had come upon that week. Everybody would throw into the hopper his most glittering generality, and finally some central tendency would emerge and the correspondent would type it out, and it always sounded just dandy, and when it appeared in the magazine it created the impression that only the editors of this journal were in touch with the infinite.
But two weeks later, if one looked back upon the earth-shaking discovery of the previous fortnight, one realized how empty it had been, how largely irrelevant and, usually, how wrong. History unfolds its revealing disclosures in a somewhat more stately pace and most often we do not recognize them as they occur.
I am sorry. I cannot write the way you want me to. I conceive of my job as placing the confused data of history in some kind of formal order, as interestingly as possible, and allowing the user to deduce for himself whatever misleading and glittering generalities he prefers. I would like to think that from my stuff illumination will begin to glow, slowly and without great conflagration, and I suppose that’s why my two books have not sold spectacularly well at the beginning and why they are now being quoted by scholars.
Would it not be better if you allow me to submit my material in my customary form and then turn it over to Carol, a damned brilliant girl, to inject the kind of flossy conclusions your readers have come to expect? She can do it and I can’t.
In the preceding excerpt there is no sarcasm. Because I realize that during the period I am writing about in this chapter, had the magazine I refer to been in existence, it might have published the following two paragraphs, and they would have been good predictions:
And so, as the year 1861 draws to its close with the discovery of rich deposits of gold at Blue Valley in the Colorado Rockies, all men concerned with the Indian problem know one thing: that the ore-rich lands ceded to the Indian in perpetuity by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 will have to be taken away from them, and the sooner this reclamation starts, the better it will be for the white man … and for the Indian.
And so, as the year 1864 draws to its bloody close with the massacre at Rattlesnake Buttes, even reasonable men are concluding that the Indian will have to be exterminated, for coexistence of any kind has been proved impossible. Blood will flow across the prairies within six months, and in the end the Indians will be either wiped out or chased from Colorado soil, and the fault will be theirs, because they obstinately refuse to live the way the white man lives, and this cannot be tolerated.
The press. You may want to pay some attention to Peter Held, the editor of the Zendt’s Farm Clarion. Son of a German printer and an English schoolteacher, he was born in Connecticut, and hauled a Columbian printing press from there to Pittsburgh, to Cincinnati, to Franklin, to St. Joseph, publishing newspapers at each stop. An ardent abolitionist, for economic rather than sentimental reasons, being convinced that slavery was not profitable, he watched through a haze of tar and feathers as his press was thrown into the Missouri by St. Joseph slaveholders, fished it out and hauled it along the Platte to Zendt’s Farm, where he published one of the most vigorous dailies in Colorado Territory. His violent animosity to the Indian stemmed from the fact that during his painful hike along the Platte his party was attacked by Kiowas and his younger son killed.
He was a manifest-destiny man and proposed that the United States go to war with Great Britain over Oregon, with Mexico over the lands west of Texas, with France over islands in the Caribbean, with Russia over Alaska, and with Spain over almost any pretext. He saw clearly that irresistible forces of nationalism were in movement which must ultimately throw American settlers into all corners of the continent, and he preached that the sooner this occurred, the better.
In the agonizing sheep wars of his later years he naturally favored extermination of the sheepmen, but in the battle for free coinage of silver he sided with the little man, for he better than most understood how the west was being strangled by eastern bankers and railroad men who held the nation to the gold standard. He was an unlovely, cantankerous, vengeful man, never loath to distort the news to serve his own preconceived ends. You may not care to exhibit him as a prime example of the western editor, but there were many like him.