“We could be living in that house. It has a floor and bed frames and chairs and a horsehair couch. It has a kitchen and a kitchen wood range and a woodstove in the parlor. We could be there. Every day I see you get up, drive the stiffness out of you that came from lying on cold ground. You never complain.” He appealed to them all. “You get up, begin a hard day, no matter that you hurt, no matter that dry firewood is two miles away and you must haul it here on your backs.”
Victoria sighed. “A lodge. That’s all I want is a lodge. All it needs is a tiny goddamn fire the size of a hand, and it is warm.”
“A lodge would be good,” Mary said. “This place …” She waved at the foul clay floor which soiled their robes, and the gloomy log walls, the one tiny window, scarcely a foot square because glass was precious, the flapping door hung on leather hinges. “It’s so hard to live in it.”
Skye rose stiffly. “Dirk, we’ll talk to the agent.”
“About what?”
“About the future.”
Dirk’s father dusted off his top hat and settled it on his gray hair and brushed his old leathers, making himself presentable.
“What future?” Victoria said.
Skye turned to her. “We don’t need to stay here. We can go live with your people.”
Victoria’s face told Dirk everything he needed to know. For weeks, this ragged family had lived in deep silence, the women bravely enduring a miserable life in a place that was neither a village nor a new home for his mother’s people.
Dirk followed his father toward the distant white buildings of the agency, the air sharp against his face.
Skye entered, lifted the top hat, and didn’t wait to be summoned by the agent, who it turned out was snoozing, his feet on his desk, his bulk filling a wooden swivel chair. Major Perkins awakened with a snort, eyed Skye and Dirk narrowly, and carefully lowered his grimy boots.
“It’s customary to knock,” the major said.
“Our apologies,” Skye said. “My son and I, we’ve been thinking about that empty school.”
“Think no more. Nothing’s going to happen.”
“The people here are slowly sinking,” Skye said. “We think we could help.”
“You were pressed into the Royal Navy at age thirteen, Skye.”
“It’s Mister Skye, sir. A preference of mine. In the New World, anyone has the right to be a mister, including these good Shoshone people, and my son Dirk. Now, as it happens, something can be done to help them. I was thinking my boy and I could teach a lot more than reading and doing numbers. These people have been pushed into giving up their lodges and building these miserable cabins, but this new life isn’t much good, sir. No one has enough firewood, and winter’s coming on. It’s not like the days when a village could take down their lodges and go to a fresh place with wood and grass. I’m proposing, Major, that we teach these people a little about business. I was a businessman in the fur trade, and as a guide, most of my life. I want to help these people. We need a firewood company, someone with a horse and wagon and a crew with saws and axes. We need a furniture company, someone who can join wood and make chairs and tables and bed frames.”
“And earn a lot of coin,” Perkins said, amused.
“Barter, sir. We have some potatoes. I’d trade some for firewood and furniture. What I propose, sir, is that my son and I start up a school. My boy will teach arithmetic and reading and spelling and all that. He knows some mechanics too. I’ll teach these people how to organize services and businesses.”
“I’m sure you’d draw crowds, Skye.”
“I think, with Chief Washakie’s help, we would.”
“Well, the answer’s no. I have no funds for a school.”
“There’s another thing, Major. This tribe needs its own herd. It needs something to replace the buffalo in the diet, and I’d like to see a few cows and a bull each month set aside from the beef allotment and kept on the reservation.”
Major Perkins almost reared back. “I’ll not permit it. I’ve a contract with ranchers to bring in thirty beeves a month, and I won’t be undercutting these good folks who supply our beef.”
Dirk wanted to yell at the man. What beef? The culls and sick animals driven here each month hardly fed anyone. Just putting them on pasture for a month or two would add plenty to the food supply.
“I will discuss that with Chief Washakie, Major. We all want to see these people properly fed and healthy and on their way to living a better life.”
“No, Skye, you won’t be competing with my suppliers. This tribe will not grow its own beef.”
“Then release them to hunt buffalo,” Skye said.
“No, if they feed themselves on buffalo meat, they’ll take food out of the mouths of the local ranchers.”
“You’d prefer that the tribes remain as they are, Major?”
“Exactly as they are, Skye. It’s all orderly and peaceful.”
“What about the school?”
“It would just be a magnet of discontent and rebellion. It would be best if it never opened its doors. In fact, I may have it torn down.”
“You don’t want them to live as white men do?”
“Well, Skye, that’s the policy of the Indian Bureau, but we know what the chances are. These are stone-age people, without the wheel, without metal tools. What good would a school do?”
“I’m sure Chief Washakie would be interested in that viewpoint, Major.”
Perkins stared. “You done, Skye? You want to register a complaint? Write my bureau? Stir up the Shoshones? Educate some boys?”
“We have one request: unlock the schoolhouse door.”
Perkins looked amused. “I might. What’s in it for me?”
“Commendation from the Indian Bureau. Anything you can report to Washington about schooling the Shoshones, making them self-supporting on farms and ranches, would win you advancement.”
Perkins yawned. “The position doesn’t pay, Skye. What’s a thousand dollars, eh? A year of toil and grief and isolation for a thousand dollars? And neither does any other in government service. So what if I rise, and become a supervisor for two thousand a year? What if I reach twenty-five hundred a year, and oversee a dozen Indian agents, eh? What if I dine with congressmen and senators, and bring in a chief now and then and present him to the White House? What then, eh? Why would I want to advance, when everything is fine right here?”
Dirk fumed. This was a world he didn’t know about, thanks to all the years he was confined in a quiet compound in St. Louis. But he was learning fast, and it was all he could do to let his father, so weary with age, conduct this exchange. The agent was absolutely in charge, knew exactly what he did not want changed, while he enriched himself.
Dirk wished he knew just how Perkins was doing it. Each month thirty beeves were supposed to arrive, but only twenty-eight actually came, and those were so miserable that two of them hardly equaled one healthy one. Each month each household got a flour and rice allotment, but it was always short. How did the major rake off a cut? Who got the beef and flour? Who paid whom? And here was the major, resisting a tribal herd, resisting a school, resisting even the teaching of agriculture to Dirk’s mother’s people.
Dirk’s father seemed more accepting of this than he should, and Dirk wondered if age had simply weakened his will or dulled his once-powerful sense of moral outrage. He had swiftly come to understand what age had done to Barnaby Skye. The man never stopped hurting. Dirk, at fifteen, could hardly imagine it, a body that hurt all the time, but his own eyes told him that his father lived with some unimaginable pain, and it was softening and withering him.
The major slowly lifted himself to his feet, smiled benignly, as one does in total victory, or perhaps in total power, and nodded. Dirk saw his father nod stiffly, and slowly limp out the door. But the major’s gaze was not on the old man, it was on Dirk, educated by the blackrobes, and that gaze was not friendly.
But outside, where a chill wind whipped through their coats, Skye s
eemed to transform himself.
“Time to talk to the chief,” he said. “We’re going to go out on the biggest buffalo hunt ever to leave the reservation.”
“But we can’t!”
“But we will. And you and I are going to lead it. We’re headed clear out to the plains. Out near the old Bozeman Road. Out in Sioux country, where the buffalo are still thick. And we’re going to make meat. And make robes. And make jerky and pemmican and lodge covers.”
“But we can’t without the major’s permission!”
“Exactly,” said his father.
Dirk stared at a man who suddenly looked twenty years younger.
thirty-five
Chief Washakie met them, as was his custom, on his front porch. He listened closely and came to a swift decision.
“I’ve been a friend of the whites and will continue. I’ve guided my people in peace. That is my road. I will not send word to join the hunt.” But then he paused, a faint smile on his lips. “But I won’t resist it.”
That was all Skye needed. He thanked the chief and left.
“Saddle up, Dirk, and spread the word, up the valley first. We’ll leave early the day after tomorrow from here.”
“Where will we be going?”
“To the plains.”
Dirk hastened to collect one of his mother’s good horses and saddled it. He would be the messenger of a quiet rebellion, hunters leaving the ancestral home to pursue the buffalo, contrary to the express wish of the agent. It tore at him. He had learned much in St. Louis. He admired the Americans and he knew they held the future in their hands. Even their reservation system was at bottom an effort to give his people and other tribes a safe and productive homeland. His mother’s people could only bend, and change, or wither away. But here he was, furtively spreading word of a hunt, in defiance of the Indian agent, a man who was backed by the bluebelly soldiers.
How strange and determined Barnaby Skye seemed in that moment. This was not an old man, but a younger one with a will of steel.
North Star rode up the great valley of the Wind River, his message terse and clear: join Skye in the morning of the second sun for a buffalo hunt. Nothing more needed to be said. There were no remaining buffalo on the Wind River Reservation. The Shoshone hunters would arrive with whatever weapons they could manage, saddle horses, and travois horses. If the weather was good, and the hunting was good, they would bring back frozen quarters of buffalo on those travois. If the weather was warm, they would bring back jerky or pemmican. It would fill bellies during the long winter descending on them.
He found The Runner’s lodge and stopped to give word to his uncle, who spoke an odd Elizabethan English derived from his self-study of a collection of Shakespeare’s tragedies.
“Prithee what news?” The Runner asked, upon discovering his nephew at his camp.
“My father is organizing a buffalo hunt, and he’ll leave the morning of the second sun. All are welcome.”
“And where doth he intend to go?”
“The plains.”
The Runner pondered that, looking grave. The Shoshones were ancient enemies of the plains tribes. He was not a young man, and his memory stretched back into the hazy past. There was white blood in him because he was a grandson of Charbonneau, and that was one reason Dirk felt close to him, and to his mother. The mixed-bloods were a people apart.
“It is something to be considered,” The Runner said. “A trial fraught with peril.”
He was talking about the United States Army, which had a small detachment right there on the reservation, near the agency buildings. It had started up as Camp Brown. “The plains, you say? That which was ceded to the Sioux?”
Dirk nodded. Double the jeopardy, the army and the Sioux.
“Is thy father, the honored Mister Skye, in possession of his senses?”
“He is twenty years younger now than he was yesterday.”
“I will think on it,” The Runner said.
On a frosty morning a dozen or so Shoshone men of all ages, plus several women, gradually collected at the cabin. They brought riding and travois ponies, and whatever weapons were at hand. Dirk had never hunted before, and now he examined these skilled hunters and warriors with respect. He would help with the skinning, or any other way he could. His schooling had taught him much, but not such as this.
In air as sharp as needles they proceeded toward the Wind River, directly under the eyes of the two platoons of soldiers at the army camp, but they paid no heed. The soldiers were busy erecting a new post, which was the true occupation of most enlisted men on the frontier. The comings and goings of a few Shoshones didn’t interest them. Skye wanted it that way; everything out in the open. Dirk rode easily, but not comfortably because the icy wind whipped the heat from him. In time they made the river, far out of sight of the soldiers, and proceeded downstream through the majestic valley, flanked by some of the highest mountains in the Rockies. No one stayed them. Dirk half expected a squad of bluecoats to ride them down and turn them back, but it never happened.
For two days they rode east toward the plains, mostly under cast-iron-gray heavens that threatened to spill snow or icy rain over them. His mother rode comfortably; old Victoria hunched on her pony as if she had lived there all her life, and his father seemed more alive than ever. The Runner and the other Shoshones began to enjoy themselves, and one of them shot a buck that would provide some good camp meat for this large group. These people, Dirk realized, were poor. They could not renew or repair their buffalo-skin clothing because they could not reach the buffalo. They lacked funds to buy wool or cloth, and their allotments scarcely kept them warm. A few had old fusils or smoothbore rifles; only two or three had a modern weapon. Others were well armed with bows and arrows, and a few had lances.
Somewhere or other they crossed the invisible line; Dirk had no idea where it was, and the Shoshones understood it only vaguely. But they were no longer on their reservation, no longer within the “homeland” that the United States government gave them, along with two platoons of soldiers to keep them at home. Just where those lines ran was something Chief Washakie probably knew, but few of these Shoshones knew, and couldn’t fathom invisible medicine lines anyway. It was a good home, but it also was a prison without walls, and white men were claiming every inch of land outside of those medicine lines.
The sparkling river took them east, and when it curved north toward the gloomy canyon that guarded the Big Horn River basin, the hunters abandoned the stream and continued toward the plains where the buffalo were thick. They slept out-of-doors, building brush wickiups against the icy nights, and relying on their robes for warmth. Dirk watched Skye and Victoria, fearful that the hardships of the trail would weary them. It was painful to watch his father ride, with his stiff leg poking out, always unbalancing him. His eyes were so bad that Dirk wondered if the old man would hit anything he shot at with an old muzzleloader he had somehow gotten. His birth mother found ways to ease the toil of the elders, but Victoria kept shooing her away, not yet ready to surrender to great age.
The cold weather held, and that was a blessing. Ice skinned the puddles each morning, and rimmed creek banks. Frozen meat would keep. But then one afternoon the thing he dreaded most fell upon them. A patrol of blue-clad cavalry soldiers cantered up and stopped, examining Skye and his cohort. Some of the Shoshones were taut and ready for trouble. The patrol’s commander, surprisingly a major with oak leaves on his shoulders, looked dashing, with mustachios and sideburns, and merry blue eyes.
The officer addressed Skye. “Shoshones, I take it.”
“Chief Washakie’s people,” Skye said. “I’m Mister Skye, and these are my wives Victoria and Mary, and my son, Dirk.”
“Mister Skye, is it? That name’s known, sir, from ocean to ocean. I’m Dedham Graves, sir. Call me Ded.”
“Dead Graves?”
“Dedham Morpheus Graves. It runs in the family. My mother is Passionflower Nightshade Graves. My father was Oak Coffin Graves.”
He eyed the Shoshones and their dozen travois ponies. “Out for a Sunday stroll, are you?”
“It’s a good day for a stroll, sir.”
“Ah, Mister Skye, I can’t let you stroll over to Sioux country. Ever since the Honorable Red Cloud licked the United States Army, they’ve been testy about wandering Shoshones and other undesirables sampling their private larder.”
“That makes it hard on us, sir. We’re some short of meat.”
“Short of meat, are you? Don’t you get thirty beeves a month?”
“We’re supposed to, but it comes out to a regular twenty-eight, and culls at that. Not enough meat on them to feed half these people for one week.”
Major Graves eyed him. “How about the other rations?”
“Always short, sir. The agent blames his suppliers.”
“Perkins does that, does he? Who supplies the beef?”
“Big Horn Basin people, sir, as far as we know.”
“Yardley Dogwood. We’ve had a few spats with him. He doesn’t want any Yank blue-belly soldiers on his rangeland.”
“I thought he might be the one, sir.”
“He has the contract, all right. I don’t know who has the contract for the flour and sugar and all that.” Major Graves stared into the cold blue sky. “The army would like to see the Indians well fed and happy on their reserves, and learning to take care of themselves.”
“Then you’ll let us continue our Sunday stroll.”
“I hear tell there’s a few buffalo along the foothills of the Big Horn. You might take your Sunday stroll that way, steering well clear of Yardley Dogwood, of course.”
“We’ll do that, Major.”
“I know a place,” Mary said. “In our tongue it is meeteetse, the place of meeting.”
“Very good, madam.” Major Graves smiled cheerfully. “I must report this, Mister Skye. I’ll let my superiors know I had a pleasant visit with you and your family who were out on a picnic.”
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