Indians were no novelty to the townspeople of Wichita. Sabra had seen them all her life. At the age of three Cim was held up in his father’s arms to watch a great band of them go by on one of their annual pilgrimages. He played Indian, of course, patting his lips to simulate the Indian yodeling yell. He had a war bonnet made of chicken feathers sewed to the edge of a long strip of red calico.
Twice a year, chaperoned by old General “Bull” Plummer, the Indians swept through the streets of Wichita in their visiting regalia—feathers, beads, blankets, chains—a brilliant sight. Ahead of them and behind them was the reassuring blue of United States army uniforms worn by the Kansas regiment from Fort Riley. All Wichita, accustomed to them though it was, rushed out to gaze at them from store doorways and offices and kitchens. Bucks, braves, chiefs, squaws, papooses; tepees, poles, pots, dogs, ponies, the cavalcade swept through the quiet sunny streets of the mid-western town, a vivid frieze of color against the drab monotony of the prairies.
In late spring it was likely to be the Cheyennes going north from their reservation in the Indian Territory to visit their cousins the Sioux in Dakota. In the late autumn it was the Sioux riding south to return the visit of the Cheyennes. Both of these were horse Indians, and of the Plains tribes, great visitors among themselves, and as gossipy and highly gregarious as old women on a hotel veranda. Usually they called a halt in their journey to make camp for the night outside the town. Though watched over by martial eye, they usually managed to pilfer, in a friendly sort of way, anything they could lay hands on—chickens, wash unwisely left on the line, the very clothes off the scarecrows in the field.
Throughout the year there were always little groups of Indians to be seen on the streets of the town—Kaws, Osages, and Poncas. They came on ponies or in wagons from their reservations; bought bacon, calico, whisky if they could get it. You saw them squatting on their haunches in the dust of the sunny street, silent, sloe eyed, aloof. They seemed to be studying the townspeople passing to and fro. Only their eyes moved. Their dress was a mixture of savagery and civilization. The Osages, especially, clung to the blanket. Trousers, coat, and even hat might be in the conventional pattern of the whites. But over this the Osage wore his striped blanket of vivid orange and purple and red. It was as though he defied the whites to take from him that last insignia of race.
A cowed enough people they seemed by now; dirty, degraded. Since the Custer Massacre of ’76 they had been pretty thoroughly beaten into submission. Only occasionally there seemed to emanate from a band of them a sullen, enduring hate. It had no definite expression. It was not in their bearing; it could not be said to look out from the dead black Indian eye, nor was it anywhere about the immobile parchment face. Yet somewhere black implacable resentment smoldered in the heart of this dying race.
In one way or another, at school, in books and newspapers of the time, in her father’s talk with the men and women of his own generation, Sabra had picked up odds and ends of information about these silent, slothful, yet sinister figures. She had been surprised—even incredulous—at her husband’s partisanship of the redskins. It was one of his absurdities. He seemed actually to consider them as human beings.
Tears came to his own eyes when he spoke of that blot on southern civilization, the Trail of Tears, in which the Cherokees, a peaceful and home-loving Indian tribe, were torn from the land which a government had given them by sworn treaty, to be sent far away on a march which, from cold, hunger, exposure, and heartbreak, was marked by bleaching bones from Georgia to Oklahoma. Yancey and old Lewis Venable had a long-standing feud on the subject of Mississippi’s treatment of the Choctaws and Georgia’s cruelty to the Cherokees.
“Oh, treaties!” sneered Yancey’s father-in-law, outraged at some blistering editorial with which Yancey had enlivened the pages of the Wichita Wigwam. “One doesn’t make treaties with savages—and expect to keep them.”
“You call the Choctaws, the Creeks, the Chickasaws, the Cherokees and the Seminoles savages! They are the Five Civilized Tribes! They had their laws, they had their religion, they cultivated the land, they were peaceful, home-loving, wise. Would you call Chief Apushmataha a savage?”
“Certainly, sir! Most assuredly.”
“How about Sequoyah? John Ross? Stand Waitie? Quanah Parker? They were wise men. Great men.”
“Savages, with enough white blood in them to make them leaders of their dull-witted, full-blood brothers. The Creeks, sir” (he pronounced it “suh”), “intermarried with niggers. And so did the Choctaws; and the Seminoles down in Florida.”
Yancey smiled his winning smile. “I understand that while you Southerners didn’t exactly marry——”
“Marriage, sir, is one thing. Nature, sir, is another. Far from signing treaties with these creatures and giving them valuable American land to call their own——”
“Which was their own before we took it away from them.”
“—I would be in favor of extermination by some humane but effective process. They are a sore on the benign bosom of an otherwise healthy government.”
“It is now being done as effectively as even you could wish, though perhaps lacking a little something on the humane side.”
From her father and mother, too, Sabra had heard much of this sort of talk before Yancey had come into her life. She had heard of them at school, as well. Their savagery and trickiness had been emphasized; their tragedy had been glossed over or scarcely touched upon. Sabra, if she considered them at all, thought of them as dirty and useless two-footed animals. In her girlhood she had gone to a school conducted by the Sisters of Loretto, under the jurisdiction of the Jesuit Fathers. Early in the history of Kansas, long before Sabra’s day, it had started as a Mission school, and the indefatigable Jesuit priests had traveled the country on horseback, riding the weary and dangerous miles over the prairies to convert the Indians. Mother Bridget, a powerful, heavy woman of past sixty now, shrewd, dominating, yet strangely childlike, had come to the Mission when a girl just past her novitiate, in the wild and woolly days of Kansas. She had seen the oxen haul the native yellow limestone of which the building was made; she had known the fear of the scalping knife; with her own big, capable, curiously masculine hands she had planted the first young fruit trees, the vegetable and flower garden that now flourished in the encircling osage hedge; she had superintended the building of the great hedge itself, made of the tough yet supple wood that the exploring pioneer French had called bois d’arc, because in the early days the Indians had fashioned their bows of it. Then Kansans had corrupted the word until now the wood was known as “bodark.” The Mission had been an Indian school then, with a constantly fluctuating attendance. One day there would be forty pairs of curiously dead black Indian eyes intent on a primer of reading, writing, or arithmetic; the next there would none. The tribe had gone on a visit to a neighboring friendly tribe. Bucks and squaws, ponies and dogs and children, they were off on society bent, the Osages visiting the Kaws, or the Kaws the Quapaws. At other times their absence might mean something more sinister—an uprising in the brewing, or an attack on an enemy tribe. Mother Bridget had terrible tales to tell. She could even make grim jokes about those early days. “Hair-raising times they were,” she would tell you (it was her pet pun), “in more ways than one, as many a poor white settler could prove to you who’d had the scalp lifted off him by the knife.” She had taught the Indian girls to sew, to exchange wigwams for cabins, and to wear sunbonnets and to speak about their souls and their earthly troubles as well to a Great Father named God who was much more powerful than the Sun and the Rain and the Wind to whom they attributed such potency. These things they did with gratifying docility for weeks at a time, or even months, after which it was discovered that they buried their dead under the cabins, removing enough of the puncheon floor to enable them to dig a grave, laying the timbers back neatly, and then deserting the cabins to live outdoors again, going back to the blanket at the same time and holding elaborate placating ceremonies to various gods of the elements. Mother Bridget (Sister Bridget then, red cheeked in her wimple, her beads clicking a stubborn race against the treachery of the savages) and the other Sisters of Loretto had it all to do over again from the start.
All this was past now. The Indians were herded on reservations in the Indian Territory. Mother Bridget and her helpers taught embroidery and music and kindred ladylike accomplishments to the bonneted and gloved young ladies of Wichita’s gentry. The osage hedge now shielded prim and docile misses where once it had tried to confine the wild things of the prairie. The wild things seemed tame enough now, herded together on their reservations, spirit broken, pride destroyed.
Sabra had her calico pony hitched to the phaëton (a matron now, it was no longer seemly to ride him as she used to, up and down the rutted prairie roads, her black hair in a long thick braid switching to the speed of the hard-bitten hoofs). Mother Bridget was in the Mission vegetable garden, superintending the cutting of great rosy stalks of late pie plant. The skirt of her habit was hitched up informally above her list shoes, muddied by the soft loam of the garden.
“Indian Territory! What does your ma say?”
“She’s wild.”
“Do you want to go?”
“Oh, yes, yes!” Then added hastily: “Of course, I hate to leave Mamma and Papa. But the Bible says, ‘Whither thou——’ ”
“I know what the Bible says,” interrupted the old nun shrewdly. “Why does he want to go—Cravat?”
Sabra glowed with pride. “Yancey says it’s a chance to build an empire out of the last frontier in America. He says its lawmakers can profit by the mistakes of the other states, so that when the Indian Territory becomes a state some day it will know wherein the other states have failed, and knowing—us—avoid the pitfalls——”
“Stuff!” interrupted Mother Bridget. “He’s going for the adventure of it. They always have, no matter what excuse they’ve given, from the Holy Grail to the California gold fields. The difference in America is that the women have always gone along. When you read the history of France you’re peeking through a bedroom keyhole. The history of England is a joust. The women-folks were always Elaineish and anemic, seems. When Ladye Guinevere had pinned a bow of ribbon to her knight’s sleeve, why, her job was done for the day. He could ride off to be killed while she stayed home and stitched at a tapestry. But here in this land, Sabra, my girl, the women, they’ve been the real hewers of wood and drawers of water. You’ll want to remember that.”
“But that’s what Yancey said. Exactly.”
“Did he now!” She stood up and released the full folds of her skirt from the waist cord that had served to loop it away from the moist earth. She lifted her voice in an order to the figure that stooped over the pie-plant bed. “Enough, Sister Norah, enough. Tell Sister Agnes plenty of sugar and not like the last pie, fit to pucker your mouth.” She turned back to Sabra. “When do you start? How do you go?”
“Next Monday. Two wagons. One with the printing outfit, the other with the household goods and bedding. Yancey will have it that we’ve got to take along bed-springs for me, right out of our bed here and laid flat in the wagon.”
Mother Bridget seemed not to hear. She looked out across the garden to where prairie met sky. Her eyes, behind the steel-rimmed spectacles, saw a pageant that Sabra had never known. “So. It’s come to that. They’ve opened it to the whites after all—the land that was to belong to the Indians forever. ‘As long as grass grows and the rivers flow.’ That’s what the treaty said. H’m. Well, what next!”
“Oh, Indians …” said Sabra. Her tone was that of one who speaks of prairie dogs, seven-year locusts, or any like Western nuisance.
“I know,” said Mother Bridget. “You can’t change them. Nobody knows better than I. I’ve had Indian girls here in the school for two years at a stretch. We’d teach them to wash themselves every day; they’d learn to sew, and embroider, and cook and read and write. They were taught worsted and coral work and drawing and even painting and vocal music. They learned the Gospel of the Son of God. They’d leave here as neat and pretty and well behaved as any girl you’d care to see. In two weeks I’d hear they’d gone back to the blanket. Say what you like, the full-blood Indian to-day is just about where he was before Joshua. Well——”
Sabra was a little bored by all this. She had not come out to the old Mission to hear about Indians. She had come to say farewell to Mother Bridget, and have a fuss made over her, and to be exclaimed over. Wasn’t she going to be a pioneer woman such as you read about in the books?
“I must be going, dear Mother Bridget. I just came out—there’s so much to do.” She was vaguely disappointed in the dramatics of this visit.
“I’ve something for you. Come along.” She led the way through the garden, across the sandstone flagging of the porch, into the dim cool mustiness of the Mission hall. She left Sabra there and went swiftly down the corridor. Sabra waited, grateful for this shady haven after the heat of the Kansas sun. She had known this hall, and the bare bright rooms that opened off it, all through her girlhood. The fragrance of pie crust, baking crisply, came to her nostrils: the shell, of course, that was to hold the succulent rhubarb. There was the sound of a heavy door opening, shutting, click, thud, somewhere down a turn in the corridor. She had never seen Mother Bridget’s room. No one had. Sabra wondered about it. The Sisters of Loretto owned nothing. It was a rule of the Order. The possessive pronoun, first person, was never used by them. Sabra recalled how Sister Innocenta had come running in one morning in great distress. “Our rosary!” she had cried. “I have lost our rosary!” The string of devotional beads she always wore at her waist had somehow slipped or broken and was missing. They kept nothing for themselves. Strange and sometimes beautiful things came into their hands and were immediately disposed of. Sabra had seen Mother Bridget part with queer objects. Once it had been a scalping knife with brown stains on it that looked like rust and were not; another time an Osage papoose board with its gay and intricately beaded pocket in which some Indian woman had carried her babies strapped to her tireless back. There had been a crewelwork motto done in bright-colored wool threads by the fingers of some hopeful New England émigrée of years ago. Its curlycue letters announced: Music Hath Charms to Soothe the Savage Breast. It had been found hanging on the wall just above the prim little parlor organ in the cabin of a settler whose young wife and children had been killed during a sudden uprising of Indians in his absence.
Suddenly, as she waited there in the peace of the old building, there swept over Sabra a great wave of nostalgia for the very scenes she was leaving. It was as though she already had put behind her these familiar things of her girlhood: the calico pony and the little yellow phaëton; the oblong of Kansas sunshine and sky and garden seen through the Mission doorway; the scents and sounds and security of the solid stone building itself. She was shaken by terror. Indian Territory! Indian—why, she couldn’t go there to live. To live forever, the rest of her life. Yancey Cravat, her husband, became suddenly remote, a stranger, terrible. She was Sabra Venable, Sabra Venable, here, safe from harm, in the Mission school. She wouldn’t go. Her mother was right.
A door at the end of the corridor opened. The huge figure of Mother Bridget appeared, filling the oblong, blotting out the sunlight. In her arms was a thick roll of cloth. “Here,” she said, and turned to let the light fall on it. It was a blanket or coverlet woven in a block pattern of white and a deep, brilliant blue. “It’s to keep you and little Cim warm, in the wagon, on the way to the Indian Territory. I wove it myself, on a hand loom. There’s no wear-out to it. The blue is Indian dye, and nothing can fade it. It’s a wild country you’ll be going to. But there’s something in the blue of this makes any room fit to live in, no matter how bare and ugly. If they ask you out there what it is, tell ’em a Kansas tapestry.”
She walked with Sabra to the phaëton and produced from a capacious pocket hidden in the folds of her habit a little scarlet June apple for the pony. Sabra kissed her on both plump cheeks quickly and stepped into the buggy, placing the blue and white blanket on the seat beside her. Her face was screwed up comically—the face of a little girl who is pretending not to be crying. “Good-bye,” she said, and was surprised to find that her voice was no more than a whisper. And at that, feeling very sorry for herself, she began to cry, openly, even as she matter-of-factly gathered up the reins in her strong young fingers.
Mother Bridget stepped close to the wheel. “It’ll be all right. There’s no such thing as a new country for the people who come to it. They bring along their own ways and their own bits of things and make it like the old as fast as they can.”
“I’m taking along my china dishes,” breathed Sabra through her tears, “and my lovely linen and the mantel set that Cousin Dabney gave me for a wedding present, and my own rocker to sit in, and my wine-color silk-warp henrietta, and some slips from the garden, because Yancey says there isn’t much growing.”
Behind her spectacles the eyes of the wise old nun were soft with pity. “That’ll be lovely.” She watched the calico pony and the phaëton drive off up the dusty Kansas road. She turned toward the Mission house. The beads clicked. Hail, Mary, full of grace …