Centennial

by James A. Michener

  A fearful quiet settled over the region, with white men afraid to venture far from their homes and with streets in the city barricaded against possible invasion. When rumors of a beginning assault flashed through the city, citizens broke into the army ordnance warehouse and commandeered rifles, then patrolled the streets. This was not childish apprehension but an understandable fear that Indians might soon be invading the city. After all, Colorado had fewer than three hundred soldiers to protect the whole territory, and if the Indians wanted to pick off isolated farms, they could do so almost at will.

  On July 26, 1864, a rancher living east of the village of Zendt’s Farm saw Indians making off with two of his cows, which they slaughtered four miles from his home. This time there was no uncertainty as to what had happened or who the culprits were, so once more Lieutenant Tanner and his riders scoured the prairie and once more they encountered a community of tipis pitched where they should not have been. It was hardly likely that the cow-stealers were lodged in this particular place, but Tanner and his men surrounded it and with a howitzer gunned down forty-seven Indians.

  On August 13, 1864, a small band of unidentified Indians overran a peaceful farm some miles east of Denver and slaughtered one of the most attractive white families in the region, Clifford and Belle Barley and their two children. All were brutally killed, their bodies abused and then scalped. Their corpses were hauled in to Denver and put on display under the hand-lettered sign:

  THIS IS WHAT AWAITS ALL OF US

  UNLESS WE DO SOMETHING

  The bodies of the children, dreadfully mutilated, caused men and women alike to burst into tears, and families from remote areas were brought for safekeeping into Denver, where they further inflamed public opinion with their own rumors of Indian horrors. The fear which had lain over the city for some months now crystallized into terror, and men began to talk in whispers of the only alternative they saw before them: “We may have to exterminate the Indians ... wipe them out.”

  Such whispers reached Lisette Mercy, and she was filled with consternation, for during these bad times she had formed the habit of taking food and clothing to the Arapaho one mile east of Denver. For generations the Indians had camped at this site, near where Cherry Creek ran into the South Platte, and they saw no reason to alter their habits now. Chief Lost Eagle, along with several hundred of his people, pitched their tipis there frequently and met with Denver businessmen who wanted to discuss the future of the area. After all, he had visited President Fillmore following Fort Laramie, and with President Lincoln after the Treaty of 1861. Photographers had taken his portrait with each President, and the one with Lincoln showed two deeply worried men; it was difficult to guess which bore the greater burden: Lincoln, whose nation was being torn apart, or Lost Eagle, whose people were being exterminated.

  Lisette Mercy liked Lost Eagle. She found him a compassionate man who desperately wanted to do the right thing but whose ventures seemed always to go astray. He was fifty-four years old now and his influence among his people was greatly diminished; they were listening to Broken Thumb and the young firebrands. The situation had become so desperate that skirmishes were occurring between the followers of the two leaders.

  When the Barley massacre occurred Lost Eagle wanted to hurry in to Denver to explain that it was an irresponsible act, one that decent Indians could not condone, but he was met at the edge of the city by armed militiamen who warned him, “We don’t want no Indians in here, not even you,” and he was turned away from land that he had once owned.

  Lisette got to him in his tipi, bringing with her a clipping from the Zendt’s Farm Clarion:

  The die is cast. By the horrible killings of the Barley family the Indians throw down the gauntlet and challenge us to war. Let us have war, and let us have it now. Nothing less than a few months of punitive raids against the red devils will bring peace. Let us show Lo, the poor Indian once and for all who these prairies belong to. Fight, we say. And fight we would except for the vacuum of leadership in Denver.

  “My husband tries his best to make the people see the truth,” Lisette told the old chieftain, “but we have no leadership, so nothing is done.” They both felt a sense of deepening despair, Lost Eagle because he could no longer direct his people in conciliatory paths, Lisette Mercy because she saw how ineffective her husband was in trying to provide leadership at a time when only a vacuum existed.

  In politics, as in nature, a vacuum cannot long be tolerated; and two men were headed for Denver who would fill the void in startling manner. The first was the soft-spoken fifty-five-year-old one-armed general from Vermont, Laban Asher, who had led his volunteers with prudence and gallantry during some of the worst battles of the Civil War. At Vicksburg, the previous year, he had lost his right arm; his associates said that if he had charged more resolutely, he would have been far from where the bullet struck and would have taken one of the heights as well, but in his plodding way, with his arm dangling and blood spurting from beneath the tourniquet, he got his men to the ridge on time, and with far less loss of life than would have been incurred under some of the more heroic generals.

  His job was now to bring some kind of order to Colorado Territory while defending it against possible incursions by Confederate adventurers who roamed the west. He was in Denver only two weeks when word reached him that Desperado Jim Reynolds, a Confederate renegade, was storming through the Arkansas River valley, threatening communications and trying to raise levies for an attack on Denver.

  “Let there be no misunderstanding,” General Asher said firmly. “My first duty is to keep this territory in Union hands.” Without hesitation he dispatched what few troops he had to the south, where Reynolds and four of his men were captured and executed.

  Belatedly General Asher turned his attention to the Indian problem, with the newspapers and the business leaders supporting Lieutenant Tanner in calling for war and only Major Mercy counseling a more cautious approach.

  Intuitively Asher sided with Mercy. He liked him, perhaps because he, too, had been wounded in the service of his country, so that his patriotism could not be challenged; or it might have been Mercy’s calm cast of mind that Asher admired. The two men worked well together and began to devise a strategy for moving the Indians away from major trails and providing them with access to water. “We’ve also got to feed them,” Asher said one day, “now and for as far into the future as we can see. They won’t become farmers overnight. It’ll require two decades to teach them, and if they’re to learn, they’ll need better land. So feed them we must.”

  When news of this proposal leaked out, the Colorado newspapers exploded. The Clarion led the way with a savage article:

  Now the dreamer from Vermont tells us, “You must feed Lo, and be kind to him, and forget that he has slaughtered your fellow farmers like the savage he is.” He tells us this when our food prices have soared because Lo has cut off our freight and mail services. Well, we say to General Laban Asher, “Go back to Vermont with your one arm and blind eyes and leave the settlement of the Indian problem to real men who understand the issues, men like Lieutenant Abel Tanner, who knows how to shoot them up till they behave. We say, “Give Tanner a hundred trusted men on good horses and he will settle the Indian problem in two weeks. And he won’t do it by feeding them at public expense.

  “What can I do against such tactics?” Asher asked in his soft voice. He was a New England gentleman who refused to dirty himself with public brawling; he was an army officer who did not know how to respond when newspapers kept calling for the promotion of an inept subordinate like Tanner.

  “First off,” Mercy advised, ‘send Tanner back east ... tonight. They’re calling for fighters there. Let him fight.”

  “No,” Asher said cautiously, “if I do that, the newspapers will crucify me.” He paced back and forth, and for the first time Mercy noticed that the loss of the arm threw the concerned little man somewhat off balance. He had not yet learned to compensate for the missing limb, and in some str
ange way this made him insecure. Mercy’s limp had made him more daring, as if his spared life had to be used constructively, and now he said, “General Asher, you have all the right ideas. You must act upon them forcefully.”

  But Asher drew back. “Instinct tells me to play for time. Already some of the Indians are asking for tools for farming. A little more time and this public anxiety will subside. Then we can act.”

  There would be no time. In January 1864 there was a man on his way to Denver who possessed a clear vision of how the west was to be and the determination to shape it to that definition.

  He was a tall man, six-feet-two, forty-eight years old, broad of shoulder and piercing of eye. He was clean-shaven, and stood so erect that he seemed even taller than he was. He was heavy, from good eating, and he had a strong voice with a peculiar penetrating quality which made it carry over a hundred lesser voices, even if all were talking. He did not speak overmuch, and when he did, it was with a Jovian kind of finality, as if he had long considered lesser alternatives and dismissed them.

  He was Frank Skimmerhorn, from some old family of Schermerhorns, no doubt, and he came from Minnesota. There, in the years 1861-62 he “had become acquainted at first hand with Indian problems, for the Sioux, irritated by some minor alteration in procedures, had run wild and killed his parents, his wife and his daughter. A farm which had been worth twenty thousand dollars had been left desolated, and he had moved homeless from one Minnesota town to the next, hearing the terrible stories of damage done by the Sioux—a hundred ranches burned, two hundred people scalped, a whole section of the nation in disarray, and all because of a few fractious Indians.

  He left Minnesota with his son, satisfied never to return. Rights to his farmland he had sold for fifteen hundred dollars, and with this he had returned to his childhood home in Nauvoo, Illinois, where he tried to piece together for himself an explanation of what he had seen during the Indian uprising, and one night after a church meeting it had all been made clear.

  A farmer who had lived in Nauvoo all his life said, “I never cared for the Mormons. Now understand, I didn’t go to war against them the way some of my neighbors did, and I never put fire to their barns. But as a people they don’t please me, and their idea of one man having fifty-three wives, which they did. Yes, they did ...” He lost his thread and leaned against his carriage. “What was my point, Skimmerhorn?”

  “You didn’t cotton to the Mormons.”

  “Yes. Like I was sayin’, I could certainly not be called their defender, but they did have one idea that made a lot of sense, a lot of good common sense.” He paused here to let that sink in, and Skimmerhorn asked obligingly, “What was it?”

  “They had done a lot of serious study about the Indians. Sounded a good deal like you, when they talked. Confused as to who the Indians were and why they behaved in the unchristian way they did. And then it came to them in a prophecy kind of. God sent them a message sayin’ that the Indians were really Lamanites, the Lost Tribes of Israel. Yessir, way back in the year 722 B.C. when the Assyrian King Sargon took ’em into bondage ... ten tribes ... they never got back to Israel ... just wandered about the world.”

  “That’s very interesting,” Skimmerhorn said.

  “You know it’s true,” his informant continued enthusiastically. “The Indian medicine lodge, for example, with all that mysterious going-on. What is it really? The tabernacle of the Lost Tribes. And you talk about sackcloth and ashes in the Bible. Don’t the Indians mourn by cutting their hair and slashing their arms? Seems clear to me they’re Jews.”

  “That would explain why they’re so hellish,” Skimmerhorn said, grasping his informant by the arm. “You said they were Lamanites? Now, just what does that mean?”

  “I’m not a Mormon, you understand, but I’ve had my brushes with the Indians, so I listened, and as near as I could make out, the Lamanites were God’s name for the Lost Tribes, and because they had known God and turned their backs on Him, he put a powerful curse on them, and darkened their faces, and turned all men against them. Skimmerhorn, if they knew God and rejected Him, it’s our duty to hunt them down and slay them. It’s our bounden duty.”

  For some days Frank Skimmerhorn pondered this matter of the Lamanites, and he asked throughout Nauvoo for other recollections the villagers might have as to what exactly the Mormons had said during their unhappy stay there on their way to Salt Lake City, and he came up with a profound body of confirmation. The Indians really were the Ten Lost Tribes. They had been led to America by the Prophet Lehi and their faces had been darkened because of their sin in rejecting the Lord. To exterminate them was both a duty and an exaltation. They were an abomination to honest men, and the sooner they were wiped from the face of the earth, the better.

  In a dream, brought. on perhaps by too much listening and too much brooding on this problem, Frank Skimmerhorn saw that he was destined to go to Colorado, where the Indians were causing trouble among the gold-seekers, and put an end to that trouble. It was more than an invitation; it was a command. In the Clarion he wrote:

  Patient men across this great United States have racked their brains trying to work out some solution for the Indian problem, and at last the answer stands forth so clear that any man even with one eye can see it. The Indian must be exterminated. He has no right to usurp the land that God intended us to make fruitful. He has no right to chase buffalo over fields that we wish to plough, and the only logical answer to his depredation is total extermination. He and his ugly squaws and his criminal children must be exterminated, and the sooner this Territory gets about the job, the better. Today everyone cries, “Make Colorado a state!” Only when we have rid ourselves of the red devils will we earn the right to join the other states with honor. Extermination must be our battle cry.

  This letter was widely reprinted throughout the gold fields of Colorado, and men of all political persuasions began telling one another, “That feller from Minnesota, Skimmerhorn, he makes a lot of sense,” and when Skimmerhorn followed with letters detailing how a determined militia could kill off the Arapaho and Cheyenne, others throughout the territory supported his policy of total extermination.

  Of the public figures, only three dared speak out against this inhuman proposal. An Episcopal minister in Denver called it murder and got into trouble with his congregation, who had seen the four scalped bodies of the Barley family. General Asher pointed out that it was not the habit of the United States Army to sanction mass murder, and he was excoriated as a coward who refused to face up to facts. And Major Mercy cautioned against so brutal an action as the planned extermination of a body of people, only a few of whom had committed any crime and all of whom had had crimes committed against them. Skimmerhorn of course did not agree and launched a series of savage letters against him:

  Who is this so-called Major Mercy? A limping coward who shot himself in the hip at Chapultepec so he wouldn’t have to fight in our present war against the rebels. Who are his friends? All the Indian-lovers in the west, all the lily-livered cowards who are afraid to do God’s work in protecting this land against savages. And most important, who are his relatives? The Pasquinel brothers, of shameful report, are his brothers. He is married to their sister and he is more of an Arapaho than they are. I say, “Colorado should be rid of this cowardly traitor,” and I give him warning that if he continues to spout his defense of the Indian, honest patriots are going to shoot him down in the streets of Denver.

  Appalled as Mercy was by such invective, he nevertheless pleaded with his wife to avoid any public comment that might evoke further debate, but she was too much like her mother to allow such rantings to go unchallenged. Trailing Skimmerhorn from one Denver boarding house to the next, she finally found him in a hotel on Larimer Street and castigated him publicly.

  Her agitation delighted Skimmerhorn, for it provided him with an additional target. He loosed a blast of his pen at her, and this, too, was carried in the papers, allowing him to recapitulate his basic theory that every I
ndian in the territory must be slain.

  Such inflammatory statements brought the citizens to fever pitch, and they demanded military action. Unfortunately, no federal troops were available in the west, so a local militia had to be conscripted, with Colonel Frank Skimmerhorn as officer in charge. Promptly he declared martial law, promulgating these harsh directives:

  All Indians who wish to remain friendly are to report within twenty days to one of the undersigned locations and lay down their guns.

  After twenty days, any Indian encountered anywhere may be shot on sight.

  Any material possessions found on a dead Indian belong to the man who brought him to his rightful end.

  Frank Skimmerhorn

  Colonel, Special Militia

  The day after this order was broadcast, old Chief Lean Bear, whom Major Mercy had rescued from self-starvation, assembled a group of seven Arapaho, old women and old men who knew the folly of trying to fight any further. Under a white flag they marched to a surrender point in Denver, where Lieutenant Tanner shot the old man through the heart and sent the others scattering.

  When General Asher heard of this outrage he summoned Colonel Skimmerhorn, intending to give him military hell, but as he spoke he noticed that the colonel was not standing at attention and was indeed smirking. “Skimmerhorn!” he cried as loudly as his breeding would permit. “Attention!”