14. Sign language, so essential among nomadic tribesmen with no universal tongue, was perhaps more developed among North American Indians than among any other people. Nor was it a crude business of a few basic signs, but a highly-sophisticated visual system, in which the “speaker” could communicate quickly quite complicated facts and ideas. Some signs are probably well-known from the cinema – the flat hand, palm down, moved from the heart to the front, signifying “good”, for instance; but a better idea of how much could be expressed in a single gesture may be obtained from the following: the right hand, pointing forward with the edge down, meant a horse; if the thumb was raised, this signified a horse with a rider; a bay horse was indicated by touching the cheek, a black horse by indicating a black object nearby; a horse grazing was shown by dipping the fingers of the hand and moving them from side to side. Combine them all in one quick movement – and many authorities mention the speed and grace with which signs were exchanged – and you have a bay horse grazing, with or without a rider, in a split second, probably less time than it would take to say the same thing. (See G. Mallery, Sign Language Among the N. American Indians, 1st American Report, U.S. Bureau of Ethnology, 1879–80; Schoolcraft, Hodge.) Flashman mentions the Cheyenne sign; among others he must have seen that day would be the sign for Sioux (a throat-cutting motion); Pawnee (fingers cocked at the head to denote “Wolf People”); Arapaho (nose-pinched – they were known as the Smellers); and Cumanche, the Snakes (waving motion of the hand). (See Marcy, 30 Years of Army Life on the Border, 1886.)
15. Ruxton gives a colourful description of a similar eating competition in his Adventures.
16. The image and reputation of the American Indian have changed greatly in the last few decades; from being the cruel and treacherous villain of the Western scene, he has become its patriotic hero. Pendulums of fashionable thought have a tendency to swing violently, and it would be as wrong to discount the opinions of Wootton and his contemporaries as it would be to accept them without question. Undoubtedly the frontiersmen distrusted, and usually disliked, Indians: Kit Carson, who was more enlightened than most, is recorded as saying simply: “I wouldn’t trust a one of them”; Jim Bridger spoke of “the mean and wicked Sioux”, and Jim Baker, a sober and respected Mountain Man, gave the following opinion to R. B. Marcy:
“They are the most onsartenest varmints in creation, and I reckon tha’r not moren half human. You never see a human, arter you’d fed and treat him to the best fixins in your lodge, jes turn round and steal all your horses, or any other thing he could lay his hands on. No, not adzackly. He would feel kinder grateful, and ask you to spread a blanket in his lodge if you ever passed that-a-way. But the Injun don’t care shucks for you. ’Taint no use to talk about honour with them. They ain’t got no such thing. They mean varmints, and won’t never behave themselves unless you give ’em an out-and-out licking. They can’t understand white folks ways, and they won’t learn ’em. If you treat ’em decent, they think you afeard.”
An expert opinion – and what the Indians thought of Baker and his fellow-frontiersmen would be equally illuminating. We know what later Indian chiefs thought of the American Army and government, not without cause. Baker was probably right, in that Indian morals and sense of honour were different from those of the whites, and it was perhaps as difficult for a Sioux to understand white ideas of the inviolability of property as it was for a white man to appreciate, say, the point of counting coup on an enemy in battle, but not killing him. Best to say, along with Flashman, that the two sides had very different notions of proper behaviour, and leave it at that. But Wootton was right in one thing: it was not wise for a traveller to be off his guard, even with apparently friendly Indians; there is plenty of evidence that they were, to say the least, unpredictable – rather like Scottish Highlanders, in a way. (See Marcy, Thirty Years.)
17. “He kin slide!” in this context means “then there must have been something wrong with him!” and is an example of what Flashman calls the “plug-a-plew” talk of the Mountain Men, from their catch-phrase referring to the poor price of skins (a plug of tobacco for a pelt). Readers of frontier travellers such as Ruxton, Marcy, Garrard, and Parkman, and of contemporary novelists like Mayne Reid and Ballantyne, will be familiar with the dialect; apart from its many cant phrases, it had peculiarities of pronunciation – principally the reduction of the “ai” and “ee” vowels to “ah”, as in bar (bear), thar (there), hyar (here), and har (hair). Presumably it was an exaggerated form of the dialects of the Border states whence came many of the Mountain Men; as with nearly all American dialects one can trace it back to its East Anglian-Puritan-West Country origins, to which the accents and vocabularies of Northern England, Scotland, and Ulster contributed in due course. To an outsider it must have sounded barbarous, and one suspects that the Mountain Men rather enjoyed using it for effect, and that most of them could speak good formal English when they chose, in whatever accent. Uncouth they might be in many ways, but recorded examples of their speech show a respect for grammar and construction, and purity of expression, that put most modern Americans and Britons to shame. In addition, many were skilled linguists, at least acquainted with Spanish and French as well as with Indian languages.
18. Invalids travelling the Plains for their health were not as rare as Flashman imagined; even in the early days the air of Colorado and New Mexico drew chest-sufferers west. A. B. Guthrie, Jr, notes in a recent edition of Wah-to-Yah that Garrard may have made his trip because of a weak constitution.
19. It has been suggested that this expression originated in the wagon-trains, where the captain (or as he was later sometimes called, the major) was elected by vote of all the men present, candidates standing apart and their supporters tailing on behind them, the supposition being that as his “tail” grew a candidate had to run ahead to give it room. However this may be, the emigrant companies were frequently known by their captain’s name, as well as by more picturesque designation; on May 26, 1849, there arrived in Santa Fe the Black River Company, the Western Rovers, and the New York Knicker-bockers. (See Marcy and the Gold-Seekers, by Grant Foreman, 1931, an excellent work containing extracts from Marcy’s report and writings, and from the letters of Forty-Niners.)
20. Flashman’s memory is playing him false. Whatever musical accompaniment Cleonie provided, it was certainly not “Swanee River” – better known as “Old Folks at Home” – since Stephen Foster did not write it until two years later; probably he is confusing it with some equally slow and melancholy song, perhaps a spiritual. His earlier mention of “Oh Susannah!”, also by Foster, is correct; it was published in 1848, and taken up almost as a signature tune by the Forty-Niners, who parodied it with various verses, including those quoted by Flashman.
21. Flashman uses arriero (mule-packer) and savanero (night-herder) indiscriminately when referring to his mule-men.
22. The cholera epidemic of 1849 bore most severely on the Southern Cheyenne, who probably contracted it from an emigrant train on the Oregon Trail. About half the tribe died. (See David Lavender, Bent’s Fort, 1954, and H. H. Bancroft’s History of Nevada, Colorado, and Wyoming, 1889, volume XX in that great scholar’s series on the Western States. Like Schoolcraft, Hodge, Parkman, and Catlin, his work is indispensable to anyone studying the history of the Far West.)
23. “Poor bull” meant hard times, inferior eating – from the fact that bull buffalo meat was less appetising than cow meat, especially when the bull was in poor condition. “Fat cow”, in Plains parlance, meant living off the best.
24. The modern visitor to the Upper Arkansas, hearing talk of the “Picketwire” river, will search the map for it in vain. The early Spaniards called it Las Animas, but after the death of unshriven pioneers in the area, it was aptly renamed El Purgatorio. Voyageurs translated this into the French Purgatoire, which the sturdy Anglo-Saxon Americans insisted (and still do) on rendering as Picketwire, pace the cartographers, who retain the French spelling.
25. Indian smoke-si
gnalling was a code – a single puff meant that a party of strangers had been sighted: two puffs, that they were well-armed and able to resist attack. Nugent-Hare deduced correctly that the single puff, informing nearby tribesmen that the caravan was present but not formidable, would shortly bring down an attack. His immediate concern was to prevent the Indian scouts getting close enough to frighten the draught animals and so delay the train while the main attack assembled.
26. Presumably Tom Fitzpatrick, a noted frontiersman who was Indian agent for the country between the Arkansas and Platte rivers.
27. Bent’s Fort, the “Big Lodge”, perhaps the most famous outpost in the American West, was founded by the three partners of Bent, St Vrain and Company – William and Charles Bent and Cerain St Vrain – in 1833–4, to take advantage of the trade opening up between the United States and Mexico along the Santa Fe Trail. It was the hub of the trail, and of the southern plains and Rockies, the great way station of the Santa Fe traders, Mountain Men, hunters, and Indians of the region, for William Bent, the “Little White Man”, was a firm friend of the tribes, and married a Cheyenne wife. For well over a decade the fort flourished, and at its peak was as Flashman describes it – a great citadel on the prairie, with its fine rooms, stores, shops, smithy, wagon-park, billiard-room, and the rest; every Westerner of note was familiar with them. With the decline of the Santa Fe trade, the growing emigrant invasion, and the Mexican War, the prosperity of the fort declined, and after the death of his brother Charles, killed in the Pueblo-Mexican rising at Taos in 1847, William abandoned the fort in August, 1849. Thereby hangs a mystery, although it may be thought now that Flashman’s account has solved it at last.
It is supposed that William Bent, disappointed in his efforts to sell the fort to the U.S. Army for a good enough price, destroyed it by placing explosive charges and setting the place alight on August 21, 1849, having first removed all its supplies (pace Flashman). Another theory, generally discounted now, is that the fort was destroyed by Indians: Bancroft, in his Colorado (1889), refers to the destruction of Roubideau’s Fort on the Green River and adds: “Bent’s Fort was also captured subsequently and the inmates slaughtered. The absence of the owners alone prevented their sharing the fate of their employees.” Flashman has the virtue of agreeing with both theories, up to a point; his story is certainly consistent with the view that Bent mined the fort with explosives and then withdrew (although how Flashman’s caravan did not encounter him on his way down the Arkansas to Big Timbers is a mystery), and with the tradition of Indian attack, but not capture and slaughter. (The definitive work is Lavender’s scholarly history [see Note 22] which rejects the Indian destruction story of Bancroft and others. See also Garrard; Ruxton; Life of George Bent (William’s son) by George E. Hyde, 1967; and the U.S. National Park Service pamphlet, Bent’s Old Fort, which provides an excellent plan and description of the buildings.)
There is, fortunately, a happy ending to the tragic story of Bent’s. Recently it has been rebuilt at the original site, and restored to its old glory in appearance at least. Every detail, down to the trade goods and tools in the stores and shops – even the early Victorian billiard table – has been painstakingly recreated; it is a reconstruction which no enthusiast for the old West should miss.
28. We can be grateful for a passing reference which definitely establishes a date. Colonel Washington’s punitive expedition, which included Pueblo and Mexican militia, left Santa Fe on August 16 and returned on September 26, so Flashman and Susie arrived in the city on September 27. Lieutenant Harrison is one of the officers mentioned in Major Steen’s subsequent operations against the Apaches.
29. Conditions in New Mexico were as Harrison said. The Indian agent at Santa Fe at this time, J. S. Calhoun, wrote in the week of Flashman’s arrival that Apache, Navajo, and Cumanche raids were happening daily, and that it was unsafe to travel ten miles; four days later he was noting that the Indian trouble had increased and that “this whole country requires a thorough purging”. He urged a policy of “enlightenment and restraint … at the point of the bayonet”. (See Calhoun, Official Correspondence, 1915, edited by A. H. Abel. For conditions in Santa Fe and the territory, see Foreman; Webb; Inman; Marcy; Bancroft, Arizona and New Mexico, 1889; W. W. H. Davis, El Gringo, or New Mexico and her People, 1857. Also Lockwood and Cremony, see Note 30.)
30. The payment of scalp-bounty dates back at least to colonial times, a fact which some Indian apologists have been quick to seize on as proof that scalping itself was introduced into North America by European settlers; such evidence as there is (and it invariably includes reference to the Visigoths, Abbe Domenech, and the celebrated passage on the Scythians in Book IV of Herodotus) strongly suggests that scalping was an indigenous North American Indian practice which needed no encouragement from white settlers – although they gave it when it suited them, as in the case of the Proyecto de Guerra. This provided for payment on the scale quoted by Lt. Harrison, plus any loot that might be taken from the Indians; in the 1840s the price sometimes rose as high as $300 per Apache scalp. ($250 was being paid in Arizona as late as 1866; in 1870 bounty was still being paid in Mexico.)
That scalp-hunting could be a highly profitable pursuit is undisputed. Several hundred Apache scalps are said to have been taken in the infamous operation referred to by Harrison, when Johnson (variously described as an Englishman and as an American) invited the Copper Mines Indians of Santa Rita to a feast, and opened fire on them with a hidden howitzer. Another notable scalp-hunter was James Kirker, a Scot who had been a prisoner of the Apaches and risen to the rank of chief, in which capacity he was such a nuisance that the Governor of Chihuahua put a price of $9000 on his head. Kirker, a man of resource, promptly made a deal with the Mexican authorities for the sale of Apache scalps, abandoned his tribe, and led against them a mixed band of 2000 Americans, Mexicans, and Shawnee Indians. A graphic eyewitness account of Kirker’s raids has been left by Captain James Hobbs, who describes his band as “a fearful set to behold” and notes that while the usual scalp bounty was $50, “we would fight certain Indian tribes for the fun of the thing.” Chico Velasquez, referred to by Flashman, was also reputed to have driven the trade. (See Massacres of the Mountains, by J. P. Dunn, 1886; J. C. Cremony, Life Among the Apaches, 1868; Wild Life in the Far West, by James Hobbs, 1873; F. C. Lockwood, The Apache Indians, 1938; and for a fictitious but vivid account of a bounty–hunting expedition by a contemporary author who knew the scenes he described at first-hand, The Scalp-Hunters, by Captain Thomas Mayne Reid, 1851. Reid (1818–83), an Irish adventurer, was by turns an actor, journalist, and soldier; he served in the U.S. Army during the Mexican War and distinguished himself at Chapultepec, where he was badly wounded. He became famous as a writer of adventure stories, and is to be regarded as a founder of the great Victorian tradition of schoolboy literature which included Ballantyne and Henty.)
31. The law on slave-holding in New Mexico was in some confusion at this time. In September, 1849, a convention at Santa Fe of 19 elected delegates, under the acting governor, Lt-Col Beall, appointed a representative to Congress to obtain recognition as a territory; he was unsuccessful, but in May a convention at Santa Fe framed a constitution for New Mexico under which slavery was prohibited. Before this the Southern States had maintained the right of owners to hold slaves in the territory, whereas Northerners were insistent on prohibition. The position was complicated by New Mexico’s recent transfer from Mexican rule (under which slavery had been abolished) to American military government. (See Bancroft.)
32. The Jornada del Muerto was one of the most feared journeys in North America in Flashman’s time, and is no picnic today, with its unpromising grit road which, on some maps only, is shown running between San Marcial and Hatch. The editor has experience only of its southern end, and recommends a vehicle more robust than the average car; he is not aware whether the northern end of the road even exists. Mayne Reid and Ruxton testify to the Jornada’s dangers in the 1840s, as does the intrepid C
remony, who rode it several times – on one occasion covering the last 70 miles “at a run”, pursued by Apaches. The modern traveller may reflect that the Jornada’s name, so apt in the early days, was also horribly prophetic: if Ruxton and Reid and Cremony had been able to make the Dead Man’s Journey exactly a century later, they would have seen on its eastern horizon the mushroom cloud of the first atomic bomb test.
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