Centennial

by James A. Michener

  “When will it go down?” the leader asked.

  “We been here fifteen days and it ain’t made no signs yet.”

  “Can we get to Oregon? With this late a crossing?”

  “Enjoy the heat now,” Puchas said, “because you’ll get lots of snow later on.”

  Then, on the evening of the June equinox the river began to recede dramatically, and by morning Purchas called out the good news: “We cross!”

  Captain Mercy and Sergeant Lykes were first over, swimming the mules. Then the Fisher and Frazier wagons were edged down to the water, where heavy logs were strapped to their sides so that they would float. The men dismounted and pushed from behind, but the women remained in the wagons, clinging atop their baggage so their feet would remain dry. Then the oxen were lured into the water, and slowly the wagons sank, sank, sank until it looked as if they must go under. But at the calculated depth they floated, with the bottom eight inches of baggage getting soaked.

  Now the moment came when the oxen could no longer feel bottom, and they panicked, but the men swimming alongside comforted them, and soon they were swimming with confidence. To those watching, it was sickening to see the wagons almost submerged in the raging water, but after a tense moment Elly cried, “They’ve reached shore!” With much scrambling and snorting the oxen refound their footing and clambered up the muddy slope, laboriously dragging the water-soaked wagons to safety. Seccombe cheered.

  Reassured, Sam Purchas led his three horses across, and they took it easily, having often forded such streams; and then Oliver Seccombe and Levi Zendt edged the Conestoga down to the water, where they lashed extra logs to its sides. Levi entered the river, leading the oxen, which did not want to follow. For one dangerous moment they were fractious, but he quieted them, and the big beasts found their footing and proceeded to the spot at which they had to swim.

  Something went wrong. Either the oxen grew afraid or Levi gave them bad guidance, but there was confusion and the Conestoga rocked and almost turned over, pitching Elly, in her long and encumbering skirts, into the crest of the flood. That night Elly wrote:

  June 22, Saturday ... I would not have believed that two men of such exalted station as Captain Mercy and Oliver Seccombe would have leapt into a raging torrent to rescue a girl for whom they have no responsibility. When the wagon tipped and I fell into the river, I thought for sure that I was lost, because Levi was ahead and could not see me go. I was lashing my arms and screaming and swallowing muddy water and I was near dead when these two men disregarding their own safety leaped in to save me. I feel very important, as if God intended me for some significant duty and did not wish to see me lost so young for Him to have risked the lives of two such men on my behalf. The rains have stopped and the sky is clear and this may be the most beautiful night in my life.

  If it was God who saved Elly Zendt, it was also God who was responsible for the tremendous falling-out that occurred the next morning. Despite the fact that it was Sunday, Captain Mercy and Sergeant Lykes believed that they should move west in an effort to make up some of the days lost at the Big Blue, but this ran counter to the contract which had been forced by the Fishers and the Fraziers to keep the Sabbath, and they did not intend to break that rule on this particular Sunday, especially since God had seen them safely across the swollen river.

  “We have got to move west,” Mercy said firmly.

  “We shall not profane this day,” Mrs. Fisher, an unusually acidulous woman, said.

  They appealed to Sam Purchas, who listened for less than a minute, then handed down his decision: “After our delay, anybody don’t move west as fast as possible got his brains in his ass.”

  Mrs. Fisher wanted her husband to horsewhip Purchas, who told her, “You get your old man to make one move and he’s gonna have more than brains in his ass. Now you get them wagons rollin’.”

  The entourage started, with Purchas in the lead, followed by Lykes and the mules, then Captain Mercy on horseback, and the Conestoga, with Elly riding and Levi walking by the left front wheel. It was pretty clear that there was going to be no halting on this day of deliverance, and after a half-hour of wrangling in the wagons the men hitched up and fell tardily in line. They made fourteen miles that day, but the Fishers and the Fraziers spoke to no one.

  Purchas now led his group westward a few miles till they encountered the Little Blue, up whose left bank they would travel in a northwesterly direction for nearly two weeks in a long reach for the Platte River, where the real trail west would begin. On July 2 they saw beaver for the first time, a fine small dam with young playing along the banks. On July 4, which they celebrated with much firing of guns and a fine sermon by Mr. Frazier on the grandeur of the American experiment, followed by the most gracious remarks of Oliver Seccombe, who pointed out that England, in losing a colony, had gained a friend. More shooting followed and Elly baked a pie made with dried apples. Sam Purchas got very drunk and kept firing his revolver until it jammed.

  The days were pleasant for everyone except Levi, because once more the parties using horses sped forward, while the oxen slogged ahead so painfully slow. “Let ’em go!” Purchas called reassuringly. “Your turn will come.”

  On July 5 the farmers saw their first buffalo grass, and the next day, their first grama. They studied each, pulling the short stems apart and judging that nothing much could come of such stuff.

  On July 7, as they came over the crest of a small sand hill, they halted to look down upon the Platte, the strange and obstinate river they would follow for hundreds of miles. Each remarked upon its curiosities, but only Sam Purchas came close to comprehending it. Elly summarized their thinking:

  July 7, Sunday ... Like Moses looking into the promised land, we stood on a small hill and looked down at the river which will be our companion for many weeks. How small it appeared! Back east we would call it a creek, nothing more. The men all remarked how high it ran above the surrounding land. Really, it seems to be laid on top of the earth with practically no banks. And it has so many islands you would not believe it, all cluttered up. The Missouri women made some scornful remarks about it and Sam Purchas spit tobacco and said, “Lady, you see that cliff way over there? You see that one way back there that we just come down? Well, when the Platte goes into flood, it reaches from cliff to cliff.” We were awed ...

  At last they were on the real road, that remarkable, flat, solid, unbroken highway along which the wagons could move with greater speed and security than along the streets of St. Louis or Philadelphia; some days the oxen made eighteen miles, plodding along a highway as smooth as the National Road. Levi said, “This must be the best road in America,” and Sam Purchas said, “Enjoy it while it lasts.”

  Now Levi Zendt had his triumph, for with diminishing forage and hard-packed roadways, horses found the pace too much. They began to pull up lame and even to die, while parties who had relied on oxen overtook them and left them far behind. Levi found little to savor in his victory, for whenever he saw an injured horse he wanted to halt and try his hand at treating it, but Purchas was adamant “They guessed wrong and now they’ll pay for it.”

  “What will happen to them?”

  “Their horses’ll die, and then probably they’ll die,” Purchas said, adding, “And if you’d insisted on bringing your grays, they’d be dyin’ now and two weeks from now you’d die.” When they came to a group of three wagons where horse deaths had forced a halt, Purchas would not permit his party to fraternize with them or give them help. “They made their choice,” he said, but Elly ran to them with food. They were in pitiful shape, having crossed the Big Blue before there was adequate pasture for their animals.

  “Their bad luck,” Purchas said. “They shoulda asked the men who know,” and he forged ahead.

  On July 9 they came upon meadows crowded with flowers, yellow and blue, as far as they could see, and Purchas told them, “Last month this was a desert. Give ’em a little rain, they bloom overnight.” On July 10 there was enormous excitem
ent, for they spotted buffalo tracks, a profusion of tracks which made the wagons bump as the wheels bounced from one depression into the next. And next day came the thing they awaited, real buffalo. Elly wrote:

  July 11, Thursday ... Mrs. Frazier saw them first. Their wagon was in the lead and we heard her screaming, “They’re here! They’re here!” and we hurried up and saw below us on the other side of a small hill a herd of buffalo so immense that we could not see the other side. They should be counted not in hundreds but thousands, big and black and all with their heads down grazing. They were moving south, across our trail, and since they were making less than half a mile an hour, it was going to require many hours for them to pass, which meant that we would have to wait most of the day. This was settled by Sam Purchas and Captain Mercy, who got on their horses and rode down right to the edge of the herd and began shooting the younger cows, which are good to eat, the old bulls being not much, and after a while the buffalo turned away and we stopped to butcher the kill ...

  Wherever emigrants went they announced their presence by a constant fusillade, for they fired at anything that moved: antelope, deer, buffalo, prairie dogs, quail, eagles, hawks that watched from the roadside, beaver. Each group that moved west was a perambulating arsenal with guns bristling from every angle. Trains of a thousand wagons would pass without engaging in gunfire with a single Indian, but few made the journey without these doleful entries: “This day we buried Jacob Dryer of Framingham. He pulled his gun out of the wagon unmindful that it was loaded, and it blew his chest open. He lived six minutes.” “Baby Helen Dover is dead, to the great sorrow of her parents. A man in a neighboring wagon was riding with his rifle across his knees and it accidentally went off, blowing away the top of her head.” “Bill Acroyd shot off his right foot and it gangrened and we had to bury him.” For every white man killed by an Indian, and there were almost none, fifty or sixty others killed themselves or their neighbors by accidental gunfire.

  On July 12 the three wagons were heading westward in desultory fashion when two Pawnee braves rode up along the north bank of the Platte, and as soon as they came. in range Sam Purchas grabbed his Hawken, took aim and put a bullet through the head of one of the young men. His horse reared, his hands fell limp, blood spurted from his forehead and he fell to the ground. Whereupon Purchas grabbed for a second gun and would have shot down the other brave except that Captain Mercy knocked the barrel away, allowing the Pawnee to gallop off.

  “You let him get away!” Purchas bellowed.

  “You son-of-a-bitch!” Mercy cried, wresting the gun from him.

  “Don’t nobody call me a son-of-a-bitch,” Purchas snarled, grabbing for one of his knives.

  “I’m sorry,” Mercy said quickly. “I apologize.”

  “You better.” Then Purchas appealed to Levi. “Indians ain’t human. They ain’t real people, like you and me.” He looked at Seccombe, whose English mannerisms seemed prissy, and added grudgingly, “Or even him.”

  “You killed a man who’d done you no harm,” Seccombe protested.

  “He was an Indian,” Purchas said, and rolling back his left sleeve, he showed them the scars on his forearm. “I been fightin’ Indians all my life ... and they’re no damned good. That one the captain let get away will go back and make trouble for us.” He spat tobacco and stalked away, and as he disappeared, Captain Mercy said, “I’m beginning to wonder if he ever was a mountain man. They have more sense.”

  By some miracle the enraged Pawnee did not attack. But the next day they killed a defenseless husband and wife, traveling alone, some miles farther west, so that when the Purchas column reached that spot, they found a boy of six and a girl of four sitting dull-eyed by a burned-out wagon with their scalped parents bloating in the dust.

  “We can’t take no kids with us,” Purchas warned.

  “What the hell do you think we’ll do with them?” Sergeant Lykes stormed.

  “Leave ’em here. Somebody else’ll find ’em,” Purphas said.

  “I’ll take the children,” Elly said quietly, forcing her way between the two men.

  “There will be no children picked up,” Purchas shouted. He took out his revolver and said, “I am runnin’ this wagon train, and we can’t be held back by brats.”

  Before he could speak further, a rough hand reached from behind, grabbed his revolver arm and threw him to the ground. As Purchas reached for his knife, Levi leaped upon him, tore it away and smashed him across the face with a heavy right fist. “I’m takin’ the kids,” he said. At this point Captain Mercy, who had been outriding, rode up and could only guess at what had happened.

  “Mr. Purchas, what goes on here?”

  “Them fools want to take aboard two kids.”

  “What children?”

  “The Pawnee, sir,” Lykes explained. “They scalped the parents.”

  Quietly Captain Mercy looked down, and quietly he said, “Mr. Frazier and Mr. Zendt, will you please bury the bodies? Mr. Seccombe, will you find some stones for a marker?” When the graves were dug and the bodies placed within them, he directed the two children to stand beside him as he read the soldier’s benediction from Romans:

  “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?

  “As it is written, For thy sake we are killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.

  “Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us.

  “For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come.

  “Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

  Closing the Bible, he took a shovel and handed it to the little boy, saying as he did, “Son, bury your father, who fought the good fight and who died for the sins of others. Bury your mother, who loved you and who turned you over to us for protection. Remember this spot, these hills, for here your new life starts.” He helped the child to toss in the earth, then passed the shovel to the girl. Then he turned the job over to the other men and told the children, “We are your parents now. God sent us to rescue you,” and he delivered them to Elly, who took them into the Conestoga so that they could not look back upon the graves. That night she wrote:

  July 13, Saturday ... We have brought the children into our wagon, and they shall be our children from this time on. When they grow up in Oregon and become who knows what, perhaps a doctor and the wife of a minister, what a story they will be able to tell of how they got there, abandoned on the desert and near death only to be saved by God’s infinite pity. This is no ordinary trip, for we move within a great dimension ...

  Each of the travelers west carried with him misconceptions of the gravest order, errors which would persist and do great damage., Captain Mercy shared Elly Zendt’s impression that what they were traveling through was a desert; he could see no possible use for it in the years ahead and his reports to Washington would be widely circulated throughout the United States and Europe, giving credence to the term “The Great American Desert”:

  The land beyond the Missouri River is barren, windswept, without cover for man or animal and without any possible kind of future promise. Our government should maintain forts at scattered intervals throughout the area and subsequent reports of mine will recommend where and at what distances. But these are merely for the control of Indians and for the protection of emigrants on their way to greener fields in Oregon and perhaps California. No civilized man could live in either Nebraska or Kansas and as for the lands more westerly, perhaps a few Mexicans can survive in Santa Fe, but none other. This is desert, untillable, unprofitable, and unneeded.

  Sam Purchas and Oliver Seccombe divided -between them most of the existing theories about Indians, and very contradictory they were. Sam was sure the Indians had come originally from Egypt, where they had s
erved the Pharaoh who had persecuted Moses. “They was sent here as punishment,” he explained, “and it’s our duty to punish ’em ... every chance we get. God intends it that way.” He proposed executing Indians as long as his rifle fired: “This land won’t be fit for white people till they’re all dead.”

  Seccombe, like many intellectuals of his day, believed that the Indians were really the cream of Welsh society which at an early period in history had emigrated to America in search of a more natural existence, and he was convinced that somewhere just beyond the visible horizon he would come upon the noble Welshman-Indian he sought. He had acquired this faith when a student at Oxford studying the poetry of John Dryden:

  I am as free as nature first made man,