Since no tribe could be at war constantly, or hunt bison when there were no bison, and since there were no books, nor alphabet to print them in if there were, and since no one from Our People could converse with anyone from another tribe, and since there was no need of constant council meetings, Lame Beaver had days and weeks on end of idle time, with no great thoughts to occupy him and no one to share them with if they had mysteriously arisen. He led a bleak, impoverished intellectual life, the highlight coming when younger warriors crowded into his tipi to hear him tell of his adventures in the past.
Then he would seat the most promising young man beside him, and they would lean back against the willow backrests and he would speak to him alone, allowing the others on the floor to listen, and he would relate how he had battled Never-Death and how he had captured the first gun and then destroyed it. He was meticulous in his narration, always giving more than just credit to Cottonwood Knee and Red Nose, the former dead, the latter a considerable chief. He counted no coups that he had not rightfully won, and no interrupter ever had occasion to halt his narrative to ask, “Who saw you gain that coup?” The coups he counted were part of tribal history and were preserved on the skin his wife had painted.
In the early summer of 1788 he counted one of the great coups of his life, not because of its inherent bravery but because of the extraordinary consequences which flowed from it, not in that year but seventy-three years later.
It started when he was resting one day, watching his wife build the tipi. “We need some new poles,” he said half out loud.
His wife stopped her work and said, “We should have traded for them when we were north. We could have got maybe seven poles for one horse.”
“Well, we’re not north,” Lame Beaver said, “but I think I know where there are some good poles, and we don’t have to give a horse for them, either.”
She assumed from this that he intended raiding the Paw nee again; he was always ready to test his wits against them, so she decided to stop that line of reasoning before it went further. “Pawnee poles are not long enough,” she said, resuming her work.
“I would not have a Pawnee pole,” he said. “Not if a village stood unprotected right over there.” He tossed a stone toward the spot at which some years before he had killed the rattlesnake, and he began laughing at the way he had smashed the first gun. “Remember that snake?” he called to his wife as she climbed the pole to fix the skin. He made a noise like a rattler, and it was so real that she looked back in old terror. “Me,” he said.
He had a plan for getting new poles. One of the younger braves, trying to trap beaver, had gone partly by accident, partly by design, well into the mountains and had found a steep valley, one of whose sides was covered with blue spruce, the other with tall, straight aspen. He had told Lame Beaver of this, and at the time the older man had said, “That might be a place to get some tipi poles,” and the younger had said, “The aspen were very straight,” but Lame Beaver had explained, “Aspen rot. You want pine or spruce. How were the spruce?” The young brave assured him they were straight.
Now Lame Beaver sought out the younger man, Antelope by name, and asked him if he would lead a party back to the valley to collect some key-poles. The young brave was eager to do so, but warned, “It’s Ute country,” and Lame Beaver said, “Everywhere on earth is somebody’s country. You just have to be careful,” and the young brave said, “But I saw signs of Ute in the valley,” and Lame Beaver said, “I’ve been seeing Ute signs all my life, and usually it means that there’s Ute about.”
They put together a war party of eleven men plus four packhorses and marched westward for one day toward the mountain where the stone beaver tried vainly to reach the summit. The next day they followed one of the small streams which in times past had carried torrential rains and melted ice down from that mountain. They proceeded up it for a while, conning to a fork which led to the south, and this brought them at last to Blue Valley. When they came to it, plains Indians seeing the interior majesty of the mountains for the first time, they stopped in admiration, aware that they were viewing one of the precious sights of their earth.
That day it was magnificent, the dark-blue spruce clustering together on the southern bank where there was no sun, the lighter aspen in many shades of dancing green shimmering on the north bank, and after some moments spent admiring the perfect valley, Lame Beaver dismounted, studied the terrain and said, “There have been Ute here. They were hunting beaver.” He therefore posted two outlooks and proceeded to the job of cutting key-poles among the spruce.
He had chopped down some two dozen, leaving the trimming of the upper branches to the younger men, when one of the scouts whistled like a bird and indicated that six Ute with horses and guns were coming down the valley from the opposite direction. Lame Beaver weighed this unwelcome information and decided to wait the situation out by simply halting all work and withdrawing into the protective shadows of the spruce. He did this, unaware of three unusual events that had recently taken place near where he hid.
First, in a spring freshet some years ago a boulder tumbling down the stream bed had knocked off the end of a major pipe and brought almost pure gold to the surface. The pipe, with its tip unsealed, had released several nuggets of the highest-quality gold, and these had scattered along the bottom of the stream, where later sediment had partially covered them.
Second, it had not been much later that the Ute in this district had got their first gun and with it a set of equipment for making bullets. They knew how to melt lead and pour it into the iron molds the Pawnee had traded them for beaver skins. Also, they understood powder and how to get a constant supply by trading bison skins south to the Mexicans at Santa Fe. The Ute were now an armed tribe.
Third, some time ago on an exploration down Blue Valley for beaver, a Ute brave responsible for pouring bullets in the mold had spotted the yellow nuggets in the stream bed and had idly picked them up to see if they could be molded into bullets. To his surprise, this could be done without melting, and he made two fine bullets out of pure gold. He had looked around for more of the metal, recognizing it as easier to use than lead, but he found none.
It was this brave, with the iron mold and the two gold bullets, who now came down the valley, carefully watching the stream for signs of beaver. He would have gone right past the hiding enemy had he not happened to see a white chip of wood. Thinking this to be the work of a beaver, he moved inland from the stream, turned a corner and came face to face with Lame Beaver, who knifed him in the throat and took his gun and the parfleche in which he carried his bullets.
When this was done, Our People leaped onto the trail, scaring the five remaining Ute warriors into flight. Seeing that their leader was dead and that they were outnumbered, they turned and fled back toward the head of the valley, where they hoped to find reinforcements.
This gave Lame Beaver and his companions time to load their key poles and head for lower ground, but before they did so the young brave who had discovered the valley and had led Lame Beaver to it asked him if he wanted the scalp of the dead Ute. Lame Beaver shook his head no, so the younger man neatly lifted the scalp to take back to camp as a souvenir of his first important encounter with the enemy.
Lame Beaver, like most of the serious warriors among the Cheyenne and Our People, never bothered with scalps. Collecting such grisly tokens was not a traditional part of Indian culture; it had been introduced a hundred years earlier by French and English military commanders who, before paying bounty, demanded proof from their Indian mercenaries that they had actually slain an enemy. The habit had become ingrained in the eastern tribes and had slowly spread westward, where some tribes like the Comanche made it a respected part of their ritual.
So now Our People came trailing out of the mountains with four treasures: two dozen key-poles of high quality, a Ute scalp, a memory of the most beautiful valley they had ever seen, and two gold bullets in Lame Beaver’s parfleche.
7. Invading the Camp
of Strange Gods
In the land between the two Plattes, the temperatures in winter often went down to thirty degrees below zero and stayed there for days, freezing the rivers solid. How did Our People survive?
In the first place, the air was so clear and the wind so calm at such times that the cold was exhilarating rather than exhausting. At zero, if the sun was out, men often played at stick games, wearing nothing above the waist, and at ten below, the weather could be quite pleasant, if there was no wind.
In the second place, the Indians of the plains were accustomed to cold; the Cheyenne had a specific tradition on this point: “In the old days when we lived far north, before we had crossed the river and survived the flood, we used to go naked all the time and had no tipis. What did we do in winter? We found a hole in the bank and covered ourselves with earth and waited for sunny days when we could gather berries. And men went barefoot in the deepest snow and survived.” Our People also had memories of seasons without tipis, but not of years when they went naked.
But there were also blizzards, when icy cold winds howled for days, depositing so much snow that any man caught out must freeze. What did Our People do then?
They crawled into their tipis, and men sent the women out to close the upper vent, all but a crack, and they directed the women to lay heavy rocks about the edges of the tipi so that snow and wind could not infiltrate. Then all came inside, and a very small fire was lit, wasting only a few precious sticks, and it was kept burning for days, and its heat made the tipi snug, and people inside huddled together and congratulated themselves on being out of the storm, and men talked and women sat in near-darkness day after day and children peeped out and cried the exciting news over their shoulders: “You can’t even see Jumping Snake’s tipi from here.”
Winds howled and snow piled halfway up the tipi but there was great warmth within; men went outside only to cut cottonwood branches so that their horses might eat the bark. Once Lame Beaver reflected that each of his children had been born in autumn, having been conceived during blizzards. “We are like beavers,” he said, “hiding in our snug lodge while the world outside freezes.”
In the year 1799, when Lame Beaver was an old man of fifty-two, he engaged in an exploit which earned him commendation, for it was a deed requiring courage of a new sort.
In late winter that year scouts reported that two men from an entirely different tribe were making their way up the Platte. They were not red like the Pawnee, from whose lands they came, and they carried with them no Indian artifacts. They were not even dressed like Indians, for their winter clothing was bulky, and they wore no feathers or paint. Their heads were covered with beaver fur and they dragged behind them a travois that slid easily over the snow. Both carried guns, and from their travois projected two other guns, and from this they would have been judged wealthy, except that they had no horses. They were a strange enemy and would bear watching.
Why did Our People not destroy those two white men on first acquaintance? Why had the Pawnee allowed them to traverse their lands? The Pawnee must have watched them every day, as Our People now did. Perhaps it was because these two gods, for so they were called at Rattlesnake Buttes, moved with authority and without visible fear. They moved more like bison than like men, as if they belonged to the prairie and owned it. Scouts kept them in sight every hour and reported always the same thing: “They moved a little farther west today, and always they seemed to be looking for us. There is a short one, almost as dark as a Ute, and a taller one, not so tall as a Cheyenne, but tall, and on his face he has reddish hair. But it is the smaller one who gives the commands.”
When they reached the confluence of Beaver Creek and the Platte, they halted. They had detected something that pleased them and for the first time they pitched a permanent camp, taking the time and trouble to scrape snow from a flat area and to cut some cottonwood, from which they built a very low shelter. Neither of the strange gods could enter it without stooping.
Our People watched, bewildered, and Lame Beaver, as the most courageous of the Indians, decided to find out more about these gods and their curious tipi. One night, creeping very close, he watched as they unrolled bundles, disclosing small items that shimmered in the light of their torches. Long ago when trading with the Crow for tipi poles he had seen such ornaments.
Another time he saw the taller god trying to catch fish in the river, and he became so intent that he failed to notice the approach of the shorter visitor, and before Lame Beaver could run away, the stranger had come upon him, and stood fast, and stared at him. In that fleeting moment Lame Beaver perceived that these strangers were not gods. They were men like himself, and be hurried back to his tipi to inform Blue Leaf of his discovery.
“Those two, there’s nothing special about them.”
“They have four guns.”
“I could have four guns if I traded with the Pawnee.”
“Their skins are different.”
“The Ute skin is different. You can tell a Ute from the other side of the river.”
Blue Leaf paraded all the doubts the tribe had voiced, and her husband refuted each, and finally she conceded, “If they are like us, and if they are going to live among us, we should talk with them.”
“That was my thought,” Lame Beaver said, and forthwith he walked boldly to where the two strangers waited, and although many in his camp predicted disaster or death, he strode up to them, and looked at them, and raised his hand in greeting.
As he stood there the smaller man began cleverly to disclose the infinite variety of things he had brought up the river. One parfleche had scintillating beads, all in a row and of different colors. A pack contained blankets, not made of bison hide but of some soft and pliant material. Finally the man unfolded a special parfleche, and inside glimmered one of the most beautiful substances Lame Beaver had ever seen, a hard metal like the barrel of a gun, but bright and clean and very white.
“Silver,” the short man said time and again, “silver,” but when Lame Beaver reached for it, the man drew it back and lifted a beaver pelt. “Beaver,” he kept repeating, indicating that if the Indians brought him pelts, he would give them shining ornaments of silver. And to prove his good intentions he handed a bracelet to Lame Beaver.
Back in his tipi, Lame Beaver put the, lovely thing on his wife’s arm, and she moved gracefully with it, allowing the sun to strike its facets, and it was then that he reached his decision: “I will explore the camp of the strangers to determine what their medicine is.”
So, late on a dark night, he cautiously approached their tipi, but he hesitated outside, gripped by a deeper apprehension than any he had known when facing Comanche. He was entering a new and mysterious world, and his courage began to fail, but he bit his lip and crept inside, compressing himself like a sinew to avoid touching things.
Cautiously he stood erect, scarcely breathing while his eyes adjusted to the darkness. From the earth he could hear the rhythmic sleep-breath of the men and could tell that the smaller lay to his right.
He now faced the most difficult part of his mission. To count coup, he must touch one of them, and characteristically he chose the dark leader. Bending a fraction of an inch at a time, he brought himself closer and closer to the sleeping man until their faces almost touched. He then reached out his hand to place it upon the dark body, when in the dim light he became aware of a terrifying thing.
The sleeper was not asleep! He was wide awake! And in the dim light he was staring directly into the eyes of Lame Beaver.
The two men, each terrified of the other, held this gaze, and then ever so slowly Lame Beaver resumed the movement of his hand and placed it upon the dark face. The hand bore no weapon, no evil intent. Neither man breathed. The hand withdrew, and in that manner the red man first made contact with the white.
Then as Lame Beaver started to withdraw, the man in bed relaxed, and in doing so, made a slight noise. From the other bed the tall man leaped into action, grabbed a gun and would have fired
at Lame Beaver had not a deep voice from the first bed cried, “Arretez! Arretez!”
“What is it?” the man with the gun shouted.
“Il n’a pas d’armes,” and he knocked the gun away.
Slowly Lame Beaver retreated, satisfied that these were men obsessed by the same fears that gripped him, accustomed to sleep as he slept. Had they owned a special medicine, they would not have needed guns, and with this knowledge he returned to his camp.
In the morning he assembled his tribe and disclosed his findings. He assured the chiefs that the visitors were not gods and that they. had come in peace. “They could have killed me, and they let me go,” he said.
He collected all available beaver pelts and threw them onto a travois, leading the horse to where the visitors waited with their alluring goods. But as the trading began, he indicated that he wished no silver trinkets, no gaudy blankets. Pointing resolutely to one of the guns, he let the men know that he would accept nothing less. The younger man demurred, saying to his partner, “If they get guns, they’ll be as bad as the Pawnee,” and he withdrew the gun, but the older man retrieved it and handed it to Lame Beaver, saying in French, “They’ll get guns sooner or later. If they get them from us, we get their pelts.”
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