In time Greasy Lake concluded that there had to be magic involved—magic and a kind of trickery. The painter managed to make the chiefs appear not so much as they were but as they liked to believe they were: noble, strong, brave, dignified. When he mentioned this aspect of the matter to Catlin, the painter laughed.
“It’s better than that—I’m anticipating,” George assured him. “I’m making them look like they will look, in a few years.”
When he studied the pictures closely and compared them to the living men, Greasy Lake saw that what the Likeness Maker said was true. He was skipping ahead, through time, to capture something that the sitters would become.
Then Greasy Lake had a troubling thought. What if the men died before they became the men caught in the pictures? The pictures would then be pictures of ghosts—a frightening thought, one that made Greasy Lake very uncomfortable. It might be that the ghost of the man might come back and inhabit the picture itself. The spirits of dead men might find their way into these likenesses.
In the case of Flat Nose, George had judged correctly. The moment when he showed a painting to its subject was rarely without tension. Almost all Indians were at first startled to see themselves on a piece of canvas. It was a grave thing, an important thing—many had to sit and settle their nerves while they considered the situation. When they were calm enough they took a long time studying the portrait. After all, a human being was complex—there were hands, hair, ears, feet, chin to examine. Were they accurately drawn? Would the image, if it was wrong, affect their bodies? The making of likenesses was a new thing. The tribal councils were divided about it. They were mainly against it—but in the end many of the young men and even some of the old men were unable to resist this opportunity to see exactly how they looked.
Flat Nose sat with his portrait in his hands for many minutes. He brought his eyes very close to the canvas—he looked at every detail. When he was finished he nodded gravely and gave the Likeness Maker a dignified hug.
“See, I told you he’d like it,” George told Greasy Lake.
“Flat Nose doesn’t know how to look at a picture,” Greasy Lake replied. “But it’s just as well. If he had realized you made his nose too small he would have killed you.”
41
An old, half-blind Kiowa woman . . .
WHEN THE LIKENESS MAKER found out that Greasy Lake had traveled with the English party for a while he made himself a great pest, asking question after question about them. He wanted to know how many of them were still alive, and which direction they might be traveling. Greasy Lake knew they had been in Santa Fe for a while, and now, if Kit Carson was to be believed, were under escort and on their way to Mexico.
“I might need to go to Mexico myself,” George said. “At least, I intend to go to Texas. I hope you’ll come with me—I’d like to see a white buffalo too.”
The two of them had lingered near the Wichita Mountains for a few days, after the big convening. George found himself attracted to the low, humpy hills. He wanted to complete a few landscapes before moving on.
An old, half-blind Kiowa woman had been left behind by her people when the big gathering broke up. She had a small camp and a little food. Her name was Na-a-me. Greasy Lake did his best to make friends with her, but it was not easy. Na-a-me was bitter that her life was over. She did not want to be old and abandoned. She wanted to do life over again and she tolerated Greasy Lake because he claimed to be a powerful prophet. Perhaps he knew some way to help a person start life over again.
Greasy Lake had a motive of his own, when he tried to make friendly talk with the bitter Na-a-me. He suspected she knew where the white buffalo was—the beast he had been looking for for almost two years. The white buffalo had been born during a great shower of falling stars. Obviously the band that had captured the beast wanted to keep its whereabouts a secret. Greasy Lake was not even sure that the white buffalo was in a cave. That might be bad information, meant to throw searchers off. Many bands would like to have access to such a powerful beast. Many would seek to steal it, if they knew where it was. The band that had it was said to be small and poor—their best bet for keeping the buffalo would be to hide it. He had a suspicion old Na-a-me knew more than she was saying about the whereabouts of the important beast.
Old Na-a-me, however, was a tough customer. She said it was all a lie some Kickapoos made up. There never had been a white buffalo. Some Kickapoos had come on a white skin of some kind, that was all—perhaps it had belonged to a buffalo calf that had been eaten by wolves and coyotes. Some said it was a buffalo skin but others claimed it was only the skin of a goat. Old Na-a-me considered it a joke. She had lived amid buffalo all her life and had never seen a white one.
Then Greasy Lake became absolutely convinced that the old woman was lying. Probably the reason she was lying was because it was her own band that had the white buffalo.
“If you can make a picture of how a person will be, can you also make a picture of how a person used to be?” he asked the Likeness Maker. “Can you look at this old granny and draw her as she was when she was young?”
The possibility had not occurred to George Catlin—it had never crossed his mind to reverse his normal practice—that is, to show what a sitter had been like in earlier life. Of course, it should be possible. The fate of a face, like the fate of a man himself, was to change. From what was there, it should be possible to recover what had been there.
“Paint the old granny as she might have been when she had twenty summers,” Greasy Lake requested.
George squatted down and looked closely at the old woman—annoyed by the scrutiny, she glared at the white man. Why was he looking at her so?
“But she’s blind—she won’t be able to see my painting,” George said.
Greasy Lake had been watching the old woman closely and was not convinced that she was so blind.
“She just pretends to be blind so people will wait on her,” Greasy Lake concluded.
“Wait on her? They left her to die!” George pointed out. “Who do you think is going to wait on her?”
“I think she could see a picture if you painted one,” Greasy Lake insisted.
“Even if she doesn’t, it will be an interesting challenge,” George said. “I should have thought of it myself. Perhaps I can even make it a profitable sideline, when I get back home. The society matron as young belle! Why, my fortune will be made.”
At once he set to work, old Na-a-me glaring at him the whole time—she worked her gums and occasionally mouthed imprecations. George found the situation amusing; he wished Tasmin were with him to share the joke. He was trying to use his art to turn an old Kiowa grandmother into a young woman.
Despite the old woman’s irritation George took as much time with this portrait as he would have if he had been painting a mighty chief. When he finished he handed the picture to Greasy Lake, who studied it carefully before passing it on to old Na-ame. At first old Na-a-me was puzzled by what she was given. One of her eyes was gone but one was not quite so bad—peering at the picture, she decided the white man must be a powerful magician. From nothing he had made a picture of a Kiowa girl, such as her sisters and her cousins had been long ago. That the girl was meant to be herself, she did not grasp. Except for a rippling reflection in a stream now and then she had never seen herself as a girl. The Kiowa had no mirrors then—only lately had traders begun to bring them. The girl in the picture was only a girl to Na-a-me at first, and yet the white man had worked hard and brought it into being with his magic.
Then it occurred to her that the white man might be even more of a magician than she had supposed. Perhaps he was offering to make her into a girl again—young like the girl in his picture. Why would this strange magician want to do that?
After thinking about it for a few minutes Na-ame decided it was all about the white buffalo. The old prophet was trying to bribe her with the gift of youth, if she would only help him find the white buffalo. He wanted the power of the white buffalo so
badly that he had gone to the trouble of finding a magician who was offering her what appeared to be a second life. Perhaps this time she would find better husbands than she had found the first time—but if not, she would at least get to live a great many more summers.
There was a problem, though: Na-a-me had no idea where the white buffalo was—nor was she even sure there was a white buffalo. But she had always been an accomplished liar, easily deceiving her husbands and her lovers when it pleased her to. It took no time at all for her to invent a big lie about the white buffalo.
“He’s in that big canyon over by the Rio Rojo,” she said.
“The Palo Duro, she means,” George said. “That’s not far from here.”
Greasy Lake was wary. He wanted Na-a-me to be more specific.
“If the buffalo is there, where do they hide it?” he asked.
“To the west, near the sunset,” Na-a-me told him glibly. She didn’t like the prophet. He reminded her of her husband Peta, who was always asking questions, hoping to expose her lies. Greasy Lake was the same kind of man. He wanted to pick her story apart, but Na-a-me didn’t let him. The buffalo was at the west end of the big canyon. That was all she intended to say. The prophet wanted to know if the white buffalo was well guarded, but Na-a-me refused to elaborate. She considered that she had told them a perfect lie.
That night Na-a-me slept little. She was waiting to feel herself become young again.
Bitter was her disappointment to wake up to find herself still old. The white man and the prophet were leaving. She had seen the picture. Why wasn’t she young?
Then it became clear to her. The white man was a clever trickster, but not clever enough to make old people young. He had tricked her into telling them about the white buffalo. Then she remembered that she had lied too. She had no idea where a white buffalo lived. The lies, she saw, had canceled one another out. She would just die, as the People had intended she die. There would be no second life, a realization that made Na-a-me bitter. She cursed and cursed, working her mouth in anger. The white man had left her some food, some matches, some tobacco. What he hadn’t left her was a second life.
42
It was easy enough for Charlie to prance around . . .
CHARLIE WILL THINK we’re lazy if we give up and go back this soon,” Willy Bent argued. “I expect he’ll dock your wages.”
Kit began to boil at the thought of such an injustice.
“If he tries to dock my wages I’ll give him a lickin’ he’ll never forget,” Kit said. “And if he tries to dock yours I suggest you do the same.”
“He can’t dock my wages,” Willy pointed out. “I’m his partner. I own as much of the company as he does.”
“Then you could dock my wages yourself—just try it if you want a lickin’,” Kit told him, still indignant. The high-handedness of the Bents frequently put him in an angry state.
“You deserve to have yours docked,” Willy observed. “You’re the one who got us lost.”
“I ain’t lost,” Kit protested. “Why are you standing there telling lies?”
“If you don’t know which river this is, then we’re lost,” Willy insisted. “You’re the one who wanted to follow it.”
The day before they had dropped off a high escarpment into broken country of gullies and washes and salt cedar thickets. They had chosen the rough country because of the abundance of Indian sign on the plains. In the gullies and washes there were places to hide. Charlie Bent had sent them on a scouting trip to the country below the Canadian River, country that was controlled by the Comanches and the Kiowas. Charlie saw it as a major immigration route and was determined to put a trading post somewhere in it. Kit and Willy’s job was to look for likely sites, and they had found several; but the likeliest site in the country didn’t eliminate the real problem with such a venture: the real problem, still, were the Indians.
Charlie’s notion was that they might locate some small poor band and lavish presents on them until they put aside their lances and scalping knives and began to see the virtue of having traders around. Maybe the small bands could then influence the big bands. It was easy enough for Charlie to prance around his secure establishment on the Arkansas and develop theories such as that one; but it was quite another thing, as Willy and Kit could testify, to ride around in constant danger trying to locate this ideal small band.
They had been scared enough just because of the overabundance of sign, but then they ran into Tom Fitzpatrick, on his way back from a trip to Mississippi, and Tom brought news of a bad new war chief, known as Wolf Eater from his habit of chasing down wolves and eating them in order to enhance his power. Wolf Eater had recently wiped out two small immigrant trains, leaving burned and mangled bodies here and there on the prairie.
“He’s a bad un,” Tom assured them. “Whatever you do, don’t try to powwow with him.”
“I have no intention of speaking to the man,” Kit told old Tom.
It was worry about the Wolf Eater that had prompted them to leave the prairie and begin to traverse the badlands, on a day of light snow and cutting wind. In the distance a broadish, reddish river flowed east.
“That’ll be the Rio Rojo, I guess,” Kit said. “What if it ain’t?” Willy asked. “Charlie’s going to want an accurate report.”
“If he don’t trust me, let him come look for himself,” Kit replied hotly. The pickiness of Charles Bent was often hard to tolerate.
“If it ain’t the Red, I suppose it could be the Prairie Dog Fork of the Brazos,” Kit allowed.
“Whatever it is, it’s no place for a trading post,” Willy said. “You’d never get wagons through these gullies.”
There was no disputing the fact that rocky gullies had a bad effect on wagon wheels.
“There’s a big canyon around here somewhere,” Kit mentioned. “They say a million buffalo can graze in it without even being crowded.”
“I suppose that would be an exaggeration,” Willy remarked.
“What’s to stop us from having a look?” Kit argued.
Willy thought he might as well humor the man. If he refused to let him visit the canyon he’d sulk all the way back to the Arkansas.
“We can look, but I have no intention of going down in it,” Willy told him. “It would be easy to get boxed in by Indians in a hole in the ground like that.”
The next day near dusk they found themselves looking down into the Palo Duro canyon—plenty of buffalo roamed the canyon floor, though considerably less than a million, as Willy was quick to point out.
Kit, as usual, was reluctant to give ground. “I expect it’ll fill up in the spring, when the grass is better,” he said.
They were near the west end of the canyon when they spotted two horsemen who had stopped near the rim and were looking down into the shadowy gorge. One of the horses was white.
“I know that horse—it’s Greasy Lake’s,” Kit said at once. “He got that horse from the Partezon, that bad old Sioux, remember him?”
“Never met him, which is why I’m now alive,” Willy replied.
“Why, that other fellow is George Catlin—I’d swear it is,” Kit cried, excited. “He’s that fellow paints pictures of Indians. I was with him on the Yellowstone.”
“Is the man a fool?” Willy inquired. “Who would want a picture of an Indian when there’s real Indians all over the place, waiting to scalp anybody they can catch?”
“Why, easterners—the Indians there are rather tamed down,” George explained, when he and Willy had been introduced. “Most easterners today have never seen a fighting Indian, and never will.”
“I’m surprised life is so boresome that they have to look at pictures,” Willy said, even as he edged closer to the painter’s easel, where a fine rendering of a buffalo was nearly completed. The only thing wrong with the rendering of the buffalo that Willy could see was that the animal was yellow.
“Yes, yellow,” George admitted. “It’s a freak of coloration, I suppose. Greasy is mighty disapp
ointed. He says the animal was born white but turned yellow before he could locate it.”
Greasy Lake stood on the rim of the canyon, chanting—he looked wildly distraught.
“Why would a buffalo turn yellow?” Kit wondered.
“I don’t know, but it’s the only yellow buffalo I’ve ever seen—I thought I ought to paint it,” the painter said.
43
. . . the ignorant Kiowas merely made rude sounds.
THE TRIP TO THE CANYON had been arduous, the weather bitter. Along the way they had been harassed by a band of surly Kiowas, who were not much impressed by Greasy Lake’s credentials as a prophet. What they were impressed by was the white horse he rode. When Greasy explained to them that the white horse had been given him by the Partezon, the greatest of all Sioux warriors, the ignorant Kiowas merely made rude sounds. They had never heard of any Partezon. George Catlin saved the day by showing them portraits of some of the Kiowa chiefs he had painted at the great convening. The paintings startled the Kiowas very much—the fact that a white man was carrying around likenesses of their own chiefs disturbed them. Here was magic—possibly negative magic. They decided they had better go find Wolf Eater and tell him about this magic. Wolf Eater had refused to go to the great convening. He did not like talking to white soldiers.
“I’d be happy to paint Chief Wolf Eater, if he’d care to pay us a visit,” George told the Kiowas, before they left.
Greasy Lake chided George for this invitation. Wolf Eater’s only use for white men was to kill them. Inviting him to visit had not been wise.
George took these strictures with a grain of salt. Most savages he had painted in his years in the West had been volatile fellows who posed some danger—and yet usually their vanity had been his protection. Somehow the ceremonial nature of the sitting had exerted a taming quality that George had begun to find a little boring. The closest he had come to recording native life at its bloodiest were not portraits at all but sketches he had done of the Mandan torture ceremonies, and a few grisly buffalo hunts. In the torture ceremonies young men were suspended from the lodge poles by cords strung through their pectorals. There, in the faces of the old men watching, he felt he had seen real savagery, rituals absolutely pagan in their character. He considered these sketches the crown of his dangerous work, and yet he could not neglect the portraits, because it was the portraits that gained him entry to the torture lodges.
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