by Paul Horgan
They had trouble with straying animals, and herders who got lost looking for them and had to be searched for as well. Once, far off, they thought they saw in a great dark mass far ahead of them an army of Indians massed for the attack. Lamy climbed up on a waggon wheel and gazed through his telescope—it was a relief to see that it was a large caravan bound east from Santa Fe whose members had been as frightened and for the same reason as Lamy’s party.
Eventually they overtook a large caravan of eighty waggons, including those of Jewish merchants of Santa Fe, with men well armed, going their way; and the two parties joined together. The better to protect Lamy’s people and provisions, Captain Francisco Baca, who commanded the traders’ train, divided it into two columns, assigning one to each side of the bishop’s party.
According to Captain Baca’s scouting parties, there were evidences of a great body of Indians—perhaps a thousand strong—coming together for attack. A hollowing sense of increased danger pervaded the caravan.
On Sunday, 14 July, Lamy said Mass and preached on two seriously related topics—one was “the necessity of bearing with fortitude the evils of this world,” and the other was the absolute requirement that all must give “strict obedience to orders.” For now they began to see little detached parties of Indians reconnoitering and retreating, over and over again, “not unlike those wolves which are said to gather far and near to attack strayed sheep in the desert.”
But now another trial—one familiar to prairie voyagers—came to afflict the train: cholera was epidemic on the plains—almost all trains were infected, including a few of Lamy’s waggoners, and presently the disease was spreading up and down the straggling and slow-going line, chiefly among the Mexican carters. A priest who travelled part-way with Lamy saw how he “was always the same, affable, in good spirits, stout-hearted, passing his courage along to his missioners.” Such steadiness was needed in the atmosphere of uncertainty and in the face of obstacles which the party encountered. Lamy had been assured of military escort from Fort Harker. He sent a detachment to notify the commander that the train was approaching; but the rivers were in flood after the weeks of heavy rainfall and Lamy’s men never reached Harker. He went on toward Fort Larned. A detail of troops came to meet him, but because of the cholera, their officer imposed a quarantine and sent the train on a detour away from the fort. Once again, without soldiers, the long train resumed the plodding march to the southwest, drawing away into the low undulations of the distance, where the heat of the sky and the reflected heat of the earth met in a glassy waver which absorbed the line of the horizon and which either enlarged any object entering the mirage, or erased it from sight, as if it had never existed.
iv.
Prairie News
READERS of the New York Herald, on Friday, 19 July 1867, turning to page four where the running headline of THE INDIAN WAR appeared as usual, were shocked to read a “Special Telegram to the Herald” announcing
Capture of a Train near Fort Larned, with a Bishop, Ten Priests and Six Sisters of Charity—The Men killed and Mutilated, and the Women Carried Away.
The dispatch went on to particulars:
Leavenworth, Kansas, July 18, 1867
(6 o’clock P.M.)
A train was captured last Sunday, near Fort Larned, by the Indians. Bishop Lamy, ten priests and six sisters of charity accompanied the train as passengers, en route to Santa Fe. The men were killed, scalped and shockingly mutilated. The females were carried away captives. This information comes through reliable sources.
The news went rapidly across the prairies, and from Topeka Father Defouri wrote to the Society at Lyon what he had heard of the “horrible death of Mgr. Lamy.” Reporting the failure of troops to serve as escort, Defouri stated that he had no details beyond the information that the party had been massacred without mercy, but added, “we know that the body of Mgr. Lamy was horribly mutilated, ten priests were staked out and scalped. The rest were taken prisoner. The poor sisters, what horror! to be slaves at the mercy of these savages; dragged from village to village to be subjected to every kind of outrage and probably to die lashed to the post of torture. Let us draw the veil over it all, and pray.”
At Trinidad, Colorado, the pastor, Father Vermare, heard the same story at his outpost near the New Mexican border, sorrowed for those who had been slain, and for their families and colleagues in France, and held a requiem Mass in his mission chapel for the dead bishop and his companions.
v.
The Battle of the Arkansas Crossing
THE PLAINS WERE ALMOST LEVEL. There was little or no evidence of rock. As they would start out on the trail in the morning, they could see perhaps fifteen miles ahead the actual end of the day’s march. The dimension of this limited vision governed their sense of time and space, and commanded their patience in new terms. The south wind prevailed and often threw obliterating dust across the vast spaces and anything that moved across them. Imprisoned in distance itself, the travellers could find escape only through the inner self—faith in their purpose, whether that of layman or priest or nun, even as they were open to every danger of land, sky, and human attack.
As nearly as the trail allowed they had followed the Arkansas River with its great bends. It was, after the first half of the plains crossing westward, the main source of water, until it must be left behind at the final crossing west of Fort Dodge. The troops at that post were also ordered to quarantine the caravan because of the quick contagion of cholera.
As darkness was falling on 17 July, the bishop’s train halted for the night. Men began to unharness the draft animals. Others were preparing the camp. It was never clear whether darkness was a blessing or a further danger. Before the picket lines and the temporary corral had been formed, fifty Indians suddenly as if created in that instant appeared from the west and attacked the halted company with showers of bullets and menacing yelps of battle. The surprise was complete, but the Mexican drivers returned the Indian fire, leaped on their mounts and gave chase to the Indians, who in their usual tactics had ridden by to ready themselves for a return attack. The Indians vanished, and the traders returned to their camp. The attack had been a scouting raid. The camp kept extra watch all night and moved out again with daylight.
Farther west, they met trains—one large, one small—coming from Santa Fe with soldier escorts which had been sent out from Dodge. They had been attacked an evening earlier by elements of the same Indian party. There had been casualties—two men killed, three wounded, some of them troopers, and after two hours the Indians had retired. It was now clear that all the approaches, east and west, to the Arkansas River crossings in the Cimarron stretch were under the constantly moving control of the Indian bands. They were like cloud shadows, now seen, now invisible, according to the contours of the open land as they swept across it.
The trail to the river showed many roughly parallel waggon tracks, as everywhere else on the prairie route. A caravan could be expected, by anyone watching, to follow a known course. Lamy knew the path from having used it before. He knew it when they were coming close to the Cimarron crossing. He rode up and down the column giving strict instructions to all his people. By general consent he was acknowledged as a commander of the whole train, and his orders were taken by the merchant traders and the Mexican waggoners alike. He created a common nerve of understanding, and the purpose of it, as everyone understood, was defense. They moved warily along on the morning of 22 July. It was a dry day—hot, dusty. The combination of space, and unvaried slow movement over seemingly empty land, was often hallucinatory, especially as travellers strained to see, on all sides, that which remained expertly hidden.
At mid-morning—they said it was about ten o’clock—word came to Lamy, and the sisters in their waggon, that young Jules Masset was suddenly writhing with abdominal cramps. He was sweating. His fever rose. It was cholera. One or two of the Santa Fe merchants went to his waggon to do what they could for him. Massaging his belly to ease his cramps, they could only wat
ch him sicken rapidly as the morning went by and the train made no halt for the nooning. Toward two o’clock they came to the low rises beyond which lay the Arkansas River. They soon saw the river and its opposite bank.
The water ran, heavy with silt, in a channel which was part of a much wider dry bed. The approach from the left bank, where the waggons came, was wide and sloping gradually to the ford. The whole crossing was perhaps fifty yards wide. The opposite bank was more abrupt and the trail led from the river and past a grove of cottonwood trees. Tall fox-colored brush grew on both sides, and short, tawny grass, and prickly bushes with black stems and branches and parched leafage. The water was pale, reflecting the hot white sky, and the white salts of alkali showed along the brink. In the far distance ahead were low, pale blue ridges. If the hot south wind blew, it lifted heavy dust—almost sand—from the banks and threw it over everything, so that the general effect was a monotone of pale earth color.
At two o’clock the train broke the line and formed a semicircular camp, with its long side based as closely as possible on the northern bank of the river. The passenger waggons and animals were in the center, surrounded by a stockade of cargo carts close together. Sentries were posted at once to watch in all directions. One Mexican waggon forded the river without incident—though there were sinkholes and quicksand, and the current was more vagrant than it looked. The waggon, which included in its cargo kegs of brandy, rose to the crest of the opposite bank near the trees where low grass grew. The drivers left it there and returned to camp without seeing what the sentinels saw—two Indians lying “on their breasts in the weeds, like snakes.’ watching the waggon as it crossed. When enough more had crossed, leaving a divided defense, they evidently meant to make a signal for attack and take the rest of the train before it could move.
A detail of fifteen men was sent out to scout the land behind the low rises above the camp. In almost no time the scouts came tearing back to camp pursued by hundreds of Indians. Two of the scouts were almost taken, but escaped by riding in a wide circle back to the river. The camp was still settling into its routine for the usual brief nightly halt. Lamy’s preliminary orders now took hold. There were about ninety armed men in the train; they were at once ready at their stations, with loaded rifles, and on order, they fired at the Indian pursuit.
The battle was formed.
The Indians withdrew to range themselves seven or eight hundred yards away on the low crests. From that main body two small bands rode off, one to the river above the camp, the other below. They crossed the river and met at the stranded waggon. Breaking into it they found the brandy, smashed a keg, and drank.
From the rear, the main body of the Indians charged down upon the camp and were met with a great salvo from the American rifles, which were effective at long range. The attack drew back. A few fallen Indians were surrounded and carried away in the retreat, as Indians always retrieved their dead or wounded. Once again in order, the Indian phalanx flowed down the low slope but again was forced back. Their arms had less range than those in the caravan—they carried bows and arrows, rifles, and, said the bishop, “pistoles à six coups”—six-shooters. They were splendidly mounted and rode wonderfully, concealing themselves all but for feet and hands behind their horses’ bodies as they galloped past the riflemen in the waggons. When they fired, their bullets fell “like hail” but without taking serious effect.
As the battle flowed back and forth in fury, confusion, outcry, sweat, and dust, Jules Masset, knowing that he was dying, began to call out for his mother. Lamy was told of his state. The word went also to one of the Sisters of Charity—it was Sister Mary Augustine—who said she would go to the suffering young man. Told which was his waggon, she began to thread her way along the ground between other waggons. She said the arrows flying all about her sounded like “a disturbed beehive.” She reached him and gave him what comfort she could, and before he died, one of the priests came to attend him, while the battle went on outside. (In all, ten persons died of cholera on the journey, and were buried on the plains.)
Now the attackers resorted to a variety of ruses to bring the defenders out of their waggon-fortress. John Geatley, an armed waggoner, said, “The situation was appalling—it appeared we were to contend with all the savages south of the Platte River.” The Indians drove up from behind the northward ridge a large herd of cattle they had stolen from the train which had been attacked the day before. They hoped the traders would venture out to capture the cattle. But no one went. Again, a file of Indians rode past the camp, with “incredible agility,” to invite a foray into combat. Lamy harshly ordered no one to budge from his post within the stockade. They fired from their places, and he fired with them. The Indians retreated again, only to return in force time and again.
The din was appalling. Those huddling within the waggons, seeing nothing of what went on, but hearing the impact of bullets and arrows on the waggon wheels, the fusillades, and the war cries from one side and the shouted orders from the other, saw in their minds a struggle even worse than the actual one. One of the nuns—the youngest, Sister Mary Alphonse, a Lorettine eighteen years old—was in an extremity of terror. They heard the drumming hooves advance and retreat, hoping that every retreat would be the last; but the sustained onslaught continued for almost three hours. How much longer could it be resisted?
Finally, the main body of the warriors drew away, leaving behind a few small bands who rode back and forth in challenge. But the defenders knew that the surest trick of the Indians was to simulate a retreat, wait for lowered caution, or even emergence of a beleaguered force, and then to resume the attack in new ferocity, often victoriously. But presently there was no Indian in sight.
In the lull about thirty men ventured out of the waggons on to the open space between the camp and the ridge to inspect the battlefield with its scattered trophies—wounded or dead horses and their saddles, bridles, moccasins stitched with dyed quills, necklaces of shells and wampum, arrows, rawhide quivers. In a flash, a line of Indians rode down upon them from nowhere, and the traders barely made it safely back to the waggons.
During one of the charges, a warrior among the Indians was—so a man in the waggons thought—a young white man whom he identified as Charley Bent, the son of the one-time Governor Bent of New Mexico. It was a curious discovery, for young Bent had been educated in Catholic school and college of the Middle West and the East, but had chosen to join the raiding Indians in their plains life.
Toward evening, the Indian groups crossed the river to assemble near the stranded Mexican waggon, which they plundered, cracking open more brandy, and set about getting drunk. One Indian dashed back and forth across the river crying toward the camp, “Amigos! Amigos!” but no one responded; and far into the darkness, the traders continued to fire at the Indian bivouac on the far bank. After dark, the caravan animals had to be fed, and were cautiously taken to graze along the river’s edge outside the camp. Indians observed this, and some swam over under darkness and in as much quiet as possible tried to stampede the herd. But Lamy’s sentinels, whom he kept strictly at their posts, heard them coming, drove them back with rifle fire, and the animals were brought back into the corral. It seemed almost a signal that the battle was over when the Indians set the lone waggon on fire.
Presently all was quiet.
It had been a “terrible day,” said Father Brun, “these seven hours of combat.’ The pious Mexicans of the train considered that they had been saved by the presence of a bishop and his priests, as ministers of grace. Beyond that, it was Lamy’s skill and example which had most acted to save the expedition, in support of Baca’s command.
Early the next morning, in all caution, the crossing of the river by the entire train began, and took most of the day. They marched until late. There was no sign of the enemy. As they came to their slow halt and the making of camp, the young Sister Alphonse lost all her strength. The bishop was called by the other nuns who attended her. She was dying. Lamy “assisted her for death.�
�� She lived during the night, and at the assembling of the train for the next day’s march, she begged that her body not be left by the train but be taken on to Santa Fe for burial, for she was mortally afraid that the Indians would desecrate her grave if they found it. She died at ten o’clock on the morning of 24 July. Lamy wrote of her that “she was a girl beautifully educated, and a true model of piety and of all the virtues … she died of terror” endured in the battle. Her last wish could not be observed—there was always the chance of contamination by the cholera; and toward evening, with Lamy assisting one of the priests, she was buried by the trail, in a rude coffin fashioned out of some planks taken from a waggon. A wooden cross was put at the head of her grave. In a few years this disappeared; but someone found her grave anyhow, near the still-visible ruts of the trail, and not far from the tracks being newly laid for the westward advance of the railroad; for where she was buried, the prairie grass grew higher than that all around.
The train moved on, presently crossed the Cimarron River, and days later came to Trinidad, where they read in the Denver Gazette how the bishop and the other men had all been massacred, and the religious led away as captives; and where Father Vermare told them he had sung a requiem Mass for them all. “It is thus,” wrote Father Gasparri, one of the Jesuits in the party, “that history is written.’ Actually, the massacre report had been denied within a few days by the New York Tribune, and Defouri and Vermare had written hastily to Europe to relieve those who grieved for Lamy and his people. The Secretary of War, General U. S. Grant, issued a statement confirming the falsity of the report, and a Washington dispatch stated that it had been the work of “wretches who manufacture lying dispatches and send them broadcast over the country with cold-blooded malice”—the purpose being to inflame public feeling against the Indians the better to have the war of extermination against them intensified and, presumably, the western lands opened more readily to settlers. “The object in view has been too well accomplished. The indignation of the public mind against the poor Indians has been fired.”