Centennial

by James A. Michener

  The speaker was Lost Eagle, chief of Our People, who were camped this summer farther to the east. He had come to discuss with the Cheyenne the message from St. Louis, and for two days he had been arguing, with Pasquinel as his interpreter, that the only hope for the Indian was a lasting treaty with the white man, one that would give the white man freedom to traverse Indian lands and the right to establish forts, and give the Indian a confirmation of his ownership of the land. He was a persuasive arguer, a man who had a view of the future quite different from Broken Thumb’s.

  His words commanded attention, for he was known as a man dedicated to bringing his people safely through the troubled years that loomed ahead. He was the grandson of Lame Beaver, whose many coups filled the chronicles of Our People.

  He now turned to Broken Thumb and said, “Friend, we stand—you and I—at the edge of a precipice like the ones our fathers used to stampede the buffalo over. But we must not allow ourselves to be stampeded. The white man’s bad medicine has struck us hard. The buffalo are no longer easy to locate. Strangers build forts and farms on our land, and we face many decisions. You are the bravest man I know, Broken Thumb, and often have I followed you to war against Comanche and Pawnee.”

  Here he bowed gravely to the Cheyenne warrior, his tall-crowned hat dipping down to hide his face. “But with our few guns we cannot fight the white man with his cannon. If he loses a hundred men, he sends back east for replacements, but if you Cheyenne lose a hundred, where will you find their replacements? You have seen the thousands who have crossed our prairie, and more come at us every year.”

  He paused to allow this reasoning to sink in, then asked for a new calumet, and with it took a special oath that what he was about to say was true. “If the white man wants to cross our land, he will do so, whether we give him permission or not. If his sons want some of our land to farm, they will take it, either with our permission or with a gun. I say, let us go with Mercy, who is our friend, and listen to what he has to say.”

  As he spoke these conciliatory words, Mercy noticed that his interpreter, Jake Pasquinel, was becoming more and more impatient with the tenor of the message, and it appeared to Mercy that Jake was about to explode, but before anything could happen, White Antelope of the Cheyenne said solemnly, “Lost Eagle, you have never given us bad counsel. How soon will the meeting be?”

  Before Mercy could respond, Pasquinel leaped from his seat, flung his arms in the air and shouted in Cheyenne, “Don’t listen to this old woman!” Rushing up to Broken Thumb, he grabbed him by the right arm and pleaded, “Lost Eagle is a fool. The real Arapaho want war ... like the real Cheyenne.”

  “What’s he saying?” Mercy asked Strunk, and the mountain man replied, “He wants the Cheyenne to ignore Lost Eagle. Wants them to go to war.”

  “Jake!” Mercy cried. “You’re talking nonsense!”

  The half-breed turned in a flash to confront Mercy, and cried in Cheyenne, “He comes begging you to attend his meeting. Don’t go. The Oglala aren’t going. Neither are the Pawnee.”

  “Why are you trying to stop them?” Mercy asked angrily.

  “Because you white men will use the meeting to steal from us ... more land ... more rights.”

  “No, Jake. I promise you, this is to be an honest meeting. You and I will be equal. We will listen ...”

  Pasquinel thrust his face close to Mercy’s and said, “Equal? You will always have the cannon.”

  “Jake,” Mercy said softly. “Quiet down. You know the meeting will take place. Lost Eagle has said so.”

  “Him!” Jake exploded. “He speaks for no one.”

  Now Lost Eagle rose to stand beside Mercy and face the three Cheyenne chiefs. In the next decades his grave, impassive face, topped by the tall-crowned hat, would be painted by four white artists and photographed by many daguerreotypists, so that the deep lines down his cheeks would become familiar across the country, and he would represent the archetypal Indian chief, the man of unshakable integrity.

  Asking Strunk to interpret, he said, “We will come to Fort Laramie, and the Cheyenne will come too, and so will Jake ... to help us. And when the paper is ready, Broken Thumb and I will sign it side by side.” Then he added with visible sadness, “And we shall do this thing because there is nothing else we can do.”

  “Do you trust the white man?” Jake yelled at him.

  “No, but we have no other choice. We must trust and hope that this time ...” His voice trailed off. Then he took Mercy by the hand and said, “Tell the Great Father that we will be there.”

  And as Mercy left the tipi the three crucial figures created such a vivid image that it would persist in his mind forever: Broken Thumb, conservator of the old traditions, in his role as leader, twisting his right braid with the damaged thumb of his right hand; Lost Eagle, the man who had a clear vision of what the future was to be like, standing silent, the lines of his face darkened by shadow; Jake Pasquinel, on whom fell the burden of comprehending both worlds, moving in violent agitation from chief to chief, trying to convince them of the danger to which they had committed themselves.

  Mercy and Strunk rode back to the fort in confusion. They had been asked to believe that one man, Lost Eagle, could prevail against four. They were to report that the two key tribes, the Cheyenne and Arapaho, would attend in spite of the fact that Pasquinel had reported a rumor that the Pawnee were not coming.

  “What do you think?” Strunk asked.

  “If Lost Eagle is the grandson of Lame Beaver, as he says he is, the Arapaho will attend,” Mercy said.

  When they reached the fort they found bad news awaiting them. Messengers from the Comanche, the great tribe of the south, had ridden in to say contemptuously, “White man never keeps promises. Why should we waste our horses on so dangerous a trip? And why bring our good horses among those great thieves, the Shoshone and Crow? We will not come.” And that afternoon messengers from the Pawnee reported to Captain Ketchum, “We already have peace with white man. We will not bring our horses among the Sioux.”

  With the commissioners from St. Louis on their way, plus the twenty-seven wagons of gifts coming up from Kansas City, Ketchum was discouraged. On the one hand he did not relish the idea of having five or six hundred warlike Indians pressing in upon his half-fort, but on the other, he could not afford to have the proposed meeting collapse before it started, for he commanded the area, and such failure could only mean a black mark on his record. He therefore summoned Major Mercy, Joe Strunk and his lieutenants to a conference in the new officers’ quarters, and was mildly surprised when Mrs. Mercy attended, too.

  Lisette Bockweiss Mercy was thirty-six, a woman of great charm, much like her mother, now dead. A tall, exuberant person, she found it easy to accommodate herself to frontier inconveniences; while her husband had been negotiating with Broken Thumb, she had been captivating Fort Laramie. Already her steadfast friend was Mr. Tutt at the sutler’s store, who confided the standard complaint about the post: “You freeze all winter, sweat all summer, and are bored all year. If I have to stay here two more years, I believe I’ll go crazy.”

  “Nonsense,” she told him. “My father pitched his camp right where you’re standing, and spent a whole year with just one other man.”

  “Your father!” Mr. Tutt repeated incredulously. “I thought you grew up in Boston.”

  “You give me a gun and a horse,” she teased, “and I’ll bring you in a buffalo.”

  Now, at the conference, she gave sound advice: “Why not send down to Zendt’s Farm to get that marvelous old Indian expert, Alexander McKeag, and send him among the tribes? He speaks all the languages and he could persuade them.”

  “McKeag must be in his seventies,” Strunk protested, his pride wounded by the suggestion that some other mountain man might do the job better than he.

  “Seventy or not,” Lisette said, “he’d be most useful.”

  So it was agreed that Major Mercy would ride down to the South Platte and speak with McKeag and such tri
bes as they could conveniently reach on the way back. “I’m especially eager to get the Shoshone here,” Ketchum said. “They’ve been fighting everybody.”

  But before Mercy could depart, the first good news broke. “Here come the Oglala chiefs,” shouted the lookout, and everyone watched with apprehension as they forded first the Platte, then the Laramie. In grave silence they came to the adobe fort, bowed ceremoniously from their caparisoned horses and said, “The Oglala will come.”

  “Thank you!” Captain Ketchum said. He invited them to dismount and led them to his quarters in the new building. “There will be many presents,” he promised them. “You will go home with peace—peace for all the tribes.”

  This phrase disturbed the Oglala. “We will not come if the Shoshone come,” they said solemnly.

  “Oh, but the Shoshone must come,” Ketchum said briskly. “Translate that for them and explain why.”

  Strunk did his best, stressing the indestructible brotherhood that existed among the tribes. At the end he was sweating, and the Oglala said, “If the Shoshone come, we will kill them all.”

  “Oh, hell!” Ketchum groaned. “Mercy, get out of here and pick up what’s-his-name. McCabe? Ask him if he thinks the Shoshone and the Sioux can meet together.”

  So Maxwell Mercy, attended by four good riflemen, rode south to Zendt’s Farm, where he found only sorrow. Three weeks before, cholera had carried off both Alexander McKeag and his Indian wife, Clay Basket.

  “In the morning McKeag was as well as I am,” Levi Zendt said with obvious grief. “A chill. Nausea. Horrible death. Next morning Clay Basket began shaking. We buried them both down by the river.”

  Mercy was deeply saddened by such sudden death, even though a few days before he had rationalized it to the chiefs. He walked down to the river and knelt by the circle of stones marking the graves. He said a short prayer for the quiet Scotsman who had contributed so much to the west. Without rising, he turned toward the mound that covered the Indian woman who had married Lisette’s father; he remembered her as she was when she helped run the post at Fort John, soft-spoken and capable. She had been the dutiful wife of two quite different men and has been loved by each. How many squaws, he thought as he prayed, had served in this silent manner, bearing half-breed sons like the Pasquinel brothers and lovely, dark-skinned daughters like Lucinda.

  “I hope the treaty we devise will prove good to women like you, Clay Basket,” he said aloud, and on her grave he placed a clump of sage, the only flower growing in midsummer, and scarcely a flower at all.

  Lucinda, now twenty-four and at the height of her beauty, volunteered the idea that Levi should go north to act as interpreter, and she showed no fear about running the farm alone. “I’ve got the children to keep me busy, and we have three Pawnee who’ll stay as long as I feed them.”

  As the two men, brothers-in-law of a sort, rode west they talked, and Zendt said, “My wife’s half-Indian, and I try to understand what’s happenin’, but sometimes I’m plain confused. All day I hear white men complain about the shiftless, no-good Indian. Won’t work for a livin’. Isn’t fit to own land. And then I look at the land after the white men pass through. What they don’t want they just junk beside the trail. Their dead animals decay till the stench fills the prairies. And I say that in some things that count, the Indian is a damn sight better than the white.”

  Mercy was inclined to agree, and was prepared to say so when Zendt added, “I can’t figure you out, Mercy. You could have a fancy life back east, but here you are, workin’ for this treaty like you were an Indian.”

  Mercy rode in silence for some time, looking at the prairies as they swept to the northern horizon, then to the mountains emerging in the west, and finally he said, “Simple. I love this land. Loved it the first time I saw it, with you and Elly.” The name recalled painful memories and he said, “She was the soul of the west.”

  Levi said nothing, and after a while Mercy snapped his fingers and said briskly, “What you say about the settlers is true, Levi. A grubby lot. But it’s them, not the goldminers, who’ll build this land. And when they do, they won’t want Indian war parties raiding through their fields or buffalo tearing down their fences. They’re going to come ... can’t stop them. The enemy of the tipi is not the rifle. It’s the plow.”

  “Can the same land hold a farmer and an Indian?”

  “My hope is that with this treaty we’ll be able to arrange a truce. Land along the Platte for the white farmer. Empty lands like this for the Indian and his buffalo.”

  “You think land like this can ever be farmed?” Zendt asked.

  “Never. This is desert. And I think that if we can arrange a treaty now, rather than wage a war against the Indians five years from now, it’ll cost our government a lot less money in the long run.”

  “You’re not interested in the money,” Zendt countered.

  “I’m interested in justice,” Mercy said. “You and I have each been close to death, and that clears the air of petty ideas like money and advancement.”

  Zendt accepted this as the statement of a reasonable man, and they rode westward into Shoshone country, where they consulted with Chief Washakie, who said that he would not take his braves into the heart of Sioux country, for the enmity between the two tribes had been marked by constant skirmishes and many deaths.

  “It is this that we want to end,” Levi explained in broken Ute, a language close to that used by the Shoshone, and he explained with Mercy’s help how Fort Laramie would be neutral territory, a safe place for all the tribes to congregate.

  “The Sioux will kill us if we venture onto their land,” Washakie repeated.

  “It is nobody’s land,” Levi insisted. “The Cheyenne will be there ...”

  “They’re worse than the others,” Washakie protested.

  But Mercy moved in with compelling reasons. “There will be much food at the treaty,” he said. “There will be many presents from the Great Father in Washington. Do you want to deprive your people of this bounty?” When Zendt translated this, Washakie’s face broke into a smile and he said, “If there are to be presents, we will have to come,” and on the spur of the moment Mercy thought to ask, “We? How many?”

  “All of us,” Washakie said. “If it’s a decision affecting all our tribe ... all of us.”

  “How many?” Mercy asked weakly.

  “We are fourteen hundred,” Washakie said, and by the time Mercy and Zendt left the area, the Shoshone were starting to collect food and some were folding their tipis.

  When Mercy got back to Fort Laramie he found it in turmoil. One of the commissioners had reached the fort early with disastrous news. “Tell him,” Captain Ketchum directed, and the official from Washington took the major aside and recited a doleful story, whose potential for tragedy he did not even yet appreciate: “The government allocated fifty thousand dollars for this treaty. Just for the Indians. But instead of commissioning the goods in St. Louis, as we’ve done for all previous treaties, some clerk decided to buy them this time in New York. Cheaper. And in New York some other clerk decided that while we said the goods had to be in St. Louis on July 1, he felt that July 18 would be just as good, and then he found he could save a little more by using a slower railroad, so maybe they won’t get here till September.”

  “Oh, my God!” Mercy gasped.

  “I left St. Louis early,” the commissioner explained. “Had some work to do with the Sac and Fox, and when I finally got to Kansas City the presents had arrived, and I thought, ‘They’ll make it in time,’ but I was there for six days and the wagons hadn’t moved a foot.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Raised hell. Got them started.”

  “When will they be here?”

  “They’re promised for September 15. Probably get here by October 15.”

  “You’ll dispatch a messenger to Kansas City. Tonight.”

  “We’ve done so,” the commissioner said lamely. “Believe me, it was the contractors who are a
t fault in this dreadful thing. We commissioners know better.”

  Mercy went to the window and pointed to the meadows beyond the parade grounds, where Indian tipis were already beginning to appear. “Commissioner,” he said quietly, “they’re beginning to gather. God alone knows how many will be there, but if they don’t have food— Look! We have only a hundred and sixty soldiers in this garrison, with a thousand more on their way ...”

  The commissioner coughed. “Major, I’m to advise you on that, too. The War Department has changed its mind. It needs the promised men elsewhere.” He paused and said, “Your thousand men are not coming.”

  “How many are?”

  “Thirty-three dragoons, Escort for the main negotiators.”

  Major Mercy left the window and sat down. “You mean we have thousands of Indians congregating here—most of them braves, eager for a fight—and we have to do with a hundred and sixty men plus a handful of dragoons?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Oh, Jesus!” He stormed from his quarters and ran across the parade ground to the old adobe fort, where Captain Ketchum was meeting with his staff and the mountain men.