Centennial

by James A. Michener

  Lucinda said, “You mentioned Levi first,” and her mother said, “I met him first.”

  Lise Pasquinel said, “You must weigh one thing carefully. Sooner or later, I am convinced, our army will have to go to war against the Indians. Yes, it’s coming. And if at that time Lieutenant McIntosh has a chance to command, it might be taken from him if he has an Indian wife.”

  Lucinda considered this for a moment, then pointed out, “But it’s the same thing with your son. His half brothers are Indian,” and Lise said, “I think of that all the time.”

  Clay Basket said, “St. Louis is nice, but the prairies are free,” and her daughter replied, “I think of that all the time.”

  Lise Pasquinel said, “There are no goods or bads. There are only choices which lead to satisfaction and those which don’t. I know all my friends feel sorry for me, and in a way they’re entitled to—deserted as a young wife ... never remarried. And do you know why? I never remarried because I loved Pasquinel. He was an untidy, untrustworthy man, but love is something, and he gave me many hours of real joy ... two fine children. And I look at the wives who feel sorry for me, and they never had either.”

  “I was lucky,” Clay Basket said. “I knew two good men and I loved them both.”

  In July, when a caravan from St. Louis approached Zendt’s Farm, a slow, snakelike procession meandering along the Platte, its wagons raising signals of dust, Levi felt a gripping fear about his heart. “Can you tell who they are?” he called to McKeag in the tower where the older man watched. Finally he could wait no longer. Jumping on a horse, he spurred it eastward, and when he saw the lead wagon with only two trappers visible, he grew sick with apprehension, but as he dashed on to the second, he saw Lucinda McKeag standing and waving and shouting, “Levi! I’m home!” And he reined in his horse and sat staring at her, unable to believe that so beautiful a woman could have come back to him.

  There was then the problem of how to conduct a marriage with no minister closer than Fort Leavenworth, and neither McKeag nor Clay Basket had suggestions. “You’re married,” the Scotsman said, and Lucinda didn’t care much what happened. But Levi wanted things legal and he recalled that early morning scene at the Columbia ferry and he said, “If we announce that we’re going to be man and wife and two people witness, it’s the same as if a minister did it. And,” he added, “then Lucinda would have a paper.”

  So he wrote out a marriage contract which reflected the Mennonite vision of God, and when it was finished Clay Basket said, “I’d like Jacques and Marcel to witness,” so McKeag saddled up and rode to Fort John, where the brothers were reported to be living with the Arapaho, and after a week he returned with them plus six Arapaho braves.

  Jacques, now thirty-seven and as lean as a bush snake, was proud to see his sister looking so beautiful, and there was a tender moment when he greeted her, bringing her hands to his lips. In Arapaho he whispered, “The man you choose is brave. We tested him.”

  Marcel Pasquinel was thirty-five that summer, a pudgy man gifted in languages and gratified to see his sister marrying a real man instead of some Fort John voyageur. Presenting her with an oversized robe made of beaver skins, he said, “Big enough for both of you to sleep under.”

  “Are you married?” she asked her brothers, and they replied evasively. She was delighted that they had come. They seemed as hard and daring as the young officers she had met in St. Louis, and she hoped that perhaps Indians like them and white men like Mercy and McIntosh would be able to find a durable peace on the prairies, for they were equals. But when the time came for her brothers to sign as witnesses she felt deep regret that neither could write. Each signed his name with an X, and she could see that each felt resentment at being cut off from men with education.

  Zendt surprised the group by appearing not in his Lancaster clothes but in prairie dress which Clay Basket had sewed for him; henceforth he would wear no other. But what delighted the women, causing them to squeal in un-churchlike merriment, was the fact that he appeared for the first time clean-shaven. He looked quite different, younger and more determined, and his brothers-in-law congratulated him, telling their sister, “Now he’s a true Indian.” And they gave him the name Clear Face, signifying “One-Without-Guile.”

  CAUTION TO US EDITORS. Two spellings give difficulty. Where the Oregon Trail comes up from Kansas to hit the Platte River, Fort Kearny was located, but the town that grew up at that site is Kearney, Nebraska, pronounced Karny. In northern Wyoming Fort Phil Kearny is located near the town of Kearny. The Oglala Sioux headquartered in western Nebraska near the site of Ogallala, the rip-roaring cattle depot of the late nineteenth century. The beautiful mountain in Colorado, 13,147 feet high, named after these Indians, is spelled Ogalalla, but the small town in Kansas is Ogallah. Don’t ask me why.

  Politics. You may want to introduce into your text, with a panel of good portraits, facts about the debate which started at approximately this time in Congress. It dealt with the future of lands west of the Missouri. I am impressed by the fact that most congressmen were strongly opposed to our exploring, settling or incorporating the arid regions of the west into the Union. The record is filled with their doleful predictions regarding the west and their refusal to accept responsibility for it. I can dig out the quotes for you, if you should want any.

  More instructive, I think, is the fact that only a handful of stubborn men, those who had a vision of the west, kept hope alive for the Trans-Missouri region. Chief of these was Senator Thomas Hart Benton, of Missouri, in my judgment one of the greatest Americans. He would be worth a take-out by himself, as a glowing example of those sturdy Americans who see something their neighbors cannot understand and cling to it with devotion and intelligence. He was a man of staunch character, and the west owes him much.

  Here is where the portraits come in. Among the few congressmen who shared Benton’s vision, and who were willing to stick their necks out by defending the unpopular view, were these four: Senator John Tyler of Virginia; Senator Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire; Representative James K. Polk of Tennessee; and Representative James Buchanan of Pennsylvania. Each became President, and each, when he assumed office, took steps to incorporate the west. Apparently the way to preferment in those days was to express faith in the Manifest Destiny of the young nation.

  Chronology. When you submit your article to researchers, they will probably claim that Fort John ought to be called Fort Laramie, but as you will find in my next report, this change did not occur till 1849. They may also point out that it was traditional for emigrant parties to reach Fort John at least one month earlier than the Zendts got there, and they will be right. If emigrants did not leave Fort John for Oregon or California by early July, they ran the risk of being trapped in mountain blizzards, like the tragic Donner Party of 1846-47. However, the year 1844 was exceptional. One of the first things Harry Truman did when he became President was to ask the Army Engineers to research the principal floods of the Missouri-Mississippi, and their report, which I have seen, assured him that 1844 had the worst flood in recorded history. James Clyman, who left a diary of the Oregon trip he led in 1844, trailed the Zendts by about a week, and after his safe arrival in Willamet Falls (his spelling) he wrote a letter stating that other parties were trailing his by two weeks! That was a bad year.

  Inflammatory error. When my secretary, a young woman of unusual intelligence who had been educated in Wyoming, handed me her completed typescript of this chapter, she wore a look of disappointment. “I keep hoping that you’ll correct that bad error you made in your preliminary notes,” she said, “and here would have been a neat place to do it.” In frank astonishment I asked what my error had been, and she explained, “Everyone knows that the famous description ‘A mile wide and an inch deep’ applies not to the Platte River, which stole it later, but to the Powder River, which owned it early.” This claim, which I had never heard before, startled me, for in a score of historic documents I had seen this phrase used only with the Platte, but
when I told my secretary so, she bristled, and next morning she brought me a book published in 1938 by the Philadelphia novelist Struthers Burt, who loved Wyoming. Powder River: Let ’Er Buck told of the heroic exploits of the Wyoming volunteers in France in World War I. They cavorted across the bocage as if it were the plains of Wyoming, and their famous battle cry was adopted by other American units and even by Australians and New Zealanders. The full challenge was, “Powder River, let ’er buck. A mile wide and an inch deep. Too thin to plow, too thick to drink. Runs uphill all the way from Texas.” Today, wherever rodeos are held, the cowboy who draws the toughest bronco shouts as he leaves the chute, “Powder River! Let ’er buck!” So do drunks entering strange bars. Intensive questioning in libraries has satisfied me that Wyoming is divided across the middle on this one. Those in the north are sure that the phrase belongs to the Powder; those in the south claim it for their Platte, and each side is ready to fight. My own guess is that the words go far back in history and were probably applied to the Platte years before the Powder was discovered. But I am not brave enough to say so in print.

  Chapter 7

  THE MASSACRE

  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. “Broke 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 ... suppo
se 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.